Skill and luck on the links

Differentiating skill and luck has been a hot topic of late -- here's an article at Slate by Michael Agger titled "Dead Solid Lucky" looking at the topic in the context of golf.

The article draws heavily on an analysis by Robert A. Connolly and Richard J. Rendleman Jr., both from the Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina. (Their article, from the Journal of the American Statistical Association, can be found in PDF format here.)

A tidy summary, quoted directly from Agger's article: "How big a deal is luck on the golf course? On average, tournament winners are the beneficiaries of 9.6 strokes of good luck. Tiger Woods' superior putting, you'll recall, gives him a three-stroke advantage per tournament. Good luck is potentially three times more important. When Connolly and Rendleman looked at the tournament results, they found that (with extremely few exceptions) the top 20 finishers benefitted from some degree of luck. They played better than predicted. So, in order for a golfer to win, he has to both play well and get lucky."

Sounds like real life. And baseball.

Skill, luck, and more than a little style

Pictured: "Mr. May", Dave Winfield, comes through in the clutch in the 1992 World Series with, in his words, "One stinkin' little hit." The 11th-inning double drove in two runs and sealed the World Series win for the Blue Jays.


The BBC has posted an article and calculator ("Can chance make you a killer?") that is used to demonstrate the challenges in differentiating luck from skill. In this case, a simple scenario with fixed parameters is linked to a calculator that generates the range of possibilities.

While I'm not sure how this could be used in a baseball setting, it is a very good tool for demonstrating that it can be difficult -- particularly if you just look at "the numbers" in a selective way -- to make definitive statements about a player's ability. Such as, say, clutch hitting.

(Acknowledgement: The Book.)

Baseball imitates real life

How understanding luck in baseball can help understanding real life, or at least your investment portfolio: "Untangling skill and luck" by Michael J. Mauboussin.

Mauboussin uses a variety of sabermetric analysis, including Jim Albert's 2004 paper “A Batting Average: Does It Represent Ability or Luck?” and Tango's True Talent Level analysis.