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When Baseball Statistics Go Wrong…
By Brian | July 27, 2009 | Share on Facebook
Last week’s Wall Street Journal had a great article entitled Baseball Research Veers Into Left Field. Among the so-called “conclusions:”
- Major-league players who have nicknames live 2½ years longer, on average, than those without them.
- Players whose first or last name begins with “K” strike out more than those without “K” initials.
- Democrats support the designated-hitter rule more than Republicans
The whole thing is an excellent vehicle for teaching the “correlation does not equal causality” axiom.
Says one of the cited study’s co-authors, Prof. Leif Nelson of the University of California-Berkeley, “It remains entirely possible that [our study is] incorrect.”
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