RANDOMNESS AND STREAKS.

RANDOMNESS AND STREAKS. Kids, people underestimate how common streaks are when the events are random. What are the chances that if you toss a coin 100 times that you will get a streak of ten or more heads or tails? The answer is: more than 10%. Leonard Mlodinow had an article in the weekend Wall Street Journal about winning streaks which points this out. He also points out that there is more than a 75% chance that you would get a streak of six or more heads or tails in 100 tosses. Mlodinow takes Joe DiMaggio’s feat of getting a base hit in 56 consecutive games, which is considered to be an extraordinary record, one which may never be broken. This wikipedia article shows that no major league player has come within ten games of DiMaggio’s streak, even if you go back to the 1870′s. Mlodinow argues that DiMaggio’s streak is an example of a streak that could have occurred by chance alone. Given the number of players over more than a hundred years of major league baseball, the odds are better than 40% that some player or other would have matched DiMaggio’s hit streak. Mlodinow cites studies of the kind which show that basketball players do not have hot shooting streaks, as I posted on here.