Monsters of Unusual Size? I don’t think they exist.

Before we get to the standings — calm down, you there in the front row.  Yes, yes, I know, you want to see the standings today because you think something stunning has happened. But this league is being run in an academic environment, mostly, so what’s most important isn’t your personal interest in a particular team.  No, we are about the advance of knowledge, not any particular species of flora or fauna (yes, yes, or of cuisine) (yes, yes, or of dynamics… sheesh, can we move on yet?).

What? When have I EVER put the interests of a particular team over the interests of human betterment?  Oh, that?  Come on, that is ephemera, a little glitch.  Yes, glitches can too last 12 years. 12 years is nothing on the cosmic scale.

Before we get to the standings, we have to address a deep question:  Can baseball teams have personalities?  It’s tricky.  Humans looking at the night sky, or any other randomly distributed phenomenon, will find a way to “see” patterns.  We want explanations so we can make predictions. An ability to see patterns when most of the data is obscured to seem random is a powerful survival tool when one’s family is being stalked by lions, or other humans. So making “sense” of random data is a strong urge in us.

There is still a lot of random stuff going on with every baseball team in every season.  If we happen to watch a team for three games, spread out over any intervals you like, in which they score 1, 3, and 2 runs, we’re likely to conclude it is a crummy hitting team — even if the season stats show it to score right in line with the average for that year.  We’ll discount the 12 – 10 slugfests we didn’t watch while we were distracted doing something else.

So we are likely to see more personality than is really there.  But when the Rockies used to select for devout Christians — I think I remember hearing that they did this, heedless of it being illegal discrimination — did they succeed in building a team with a different feel, with different behavior patterns, different tastes and values?  I don’t know — but then you had the “fried chicken and beer” Red Sox pitching staff that blew a nine-game lead in September of 2011.  Since baseball teams are a finite set of interacting players’ personalities, I am pretty confident teams as a whole have personalities that vary from each other, and even from year to year.

Can baseball seasons have personalities?  Maybe.  They are still finite sets, etc. But the bigger and more diverse the population, the less likely that order will emerge, and the more likely that what we see as patterns are due to our unconscious structuring of the data to make sure there are no monsters under the bed.

Except that this time there IS a monster. And it’s no longer under your bed.