Article by Stephen Goldin

Copyright (c) 2009 by Stephen Goldin. All Rights Reserved.

Major league baseball is in crisis. The game is suffering from a huge credibility gap. Some of today’s greatest players are involved in doping scandals, accused of—and in some cases, admitting to—using steroids to enhance their performance. The public is aghast. This is cheating. What kind of example are they setting for our young people? To borrow a metaphor from a different sport, baseball is on the ropes.

But if you think this is bad, wait until you hear the rest of the story. The situation is worse, far worse. You see, baseball games are rigged. Every single one of them.

At least, according to the believers in “Intelligent Design.”

These are the people who look at the universe around us and say, “This could never have happened by chance. It all ties together to well. There are too many patterns. You can’t thrown a box of Legos into the air and expect all the blocks to come down and form a building. There had to be a designer, someone who planned it all out. There’s too much order for it to have been random chance.”

Their whole argument, then, is based on probability. There has to be a deliberate design behind it all because the odds against it being random are vanishingly small.

Okay, let’s assume that’s a valid form of argument and see where it takes us.

Let’s look at a perfectly ordinary major league game. On Thursday, June 12, 2008, the Milwaukee Brewers, playing in Houston, beat the Astros by a final score of 9-6. Doesn’t sound spectacularly special, does it? But let’s look at the odds a little deeper, shall we?

How likely is it that Milwaukee would have won by that exact score? Consider: They could have won 1-0. Or 2-0. Or 2-1. Or 3-0. Or 3-1. Or 3-2. Or ... Well you get the idea. The fact that they won by exactly nine to exactly six is a statistical anomaly beyond calculation.

Come to think of it, how likely was it that Milwaukee would win at all? Isn’t it statistically just as likely that Houston might have won—by a score of 1-0, 2-0, 2-1 ...? The odds against this particular outcome are mind-boggling.

But it gets even worse when you look inning by inning. In the first inning, Milwaukee didn’t score at all, while Houston got a run in the bottom half. Houston actually started out winning the game, yet they lost! Then, in the second inning, Milwaukee retaliated with five runs. Five! Do you know how statistically unlikely it is for a team to score exactly five runs in a single inning? It almost never happens. The most likely outcome in all of baseball is to get no runs in an inning. The next most probable is to get one. Two, or even three, are unlikely enough. But five? Come on, you’ve got to be kidding. Do you really expect me to believe that five in one inning is a matter of simple chance?

Houston answered with one more run in the bottom of the second. One run in an inning is much more common. Unlike the Brewers, the Astros are obeying the laws of probability.

The Brewers then quiet down for a bit, scoring nothing in the third and fourth, while the Astros score another one in the third. Milwaukee then goes on to two runs in the fifth and two more in the ninth, while Houston gets two in the eighth and one in the ninth. How likely is it that this exact pattern would come about?

Milwaukee played a full nine-inning game and scored exactly nine runs, an average of one per inning. That in itself is statistically improbable—it’s way higher than average—but think of this: In that entire span, there was no inning in which the Brewers scored exactly one run, the second most likely total. They scored either zero or they scored multiple runs, even though it averaged out to one. Random? I think not.

And the impossibilities just keep on coming. The Brewers got ten hits,one (intentional) walk and one hit batsman. Twelve men reached base, and nine of them scored. That’s an unbelievable percentage. The two teams hit a total of seven homers in the game. Seven in nine innings, close to one an inning. That’s enormously higher than the major league average.

Don’t even bother with the individual balls and strikes. Obviously the umpires were on the take there. Probably the players, too.

When you look at all these improbabilities piled one atop another, the conclusion is inescapable: The game was rigged. It couldn’t possibly have happened by random chance. Someone, somewhere, must have planned it out to happen this way. Anything else defies belief.

And this was just one unremarkable game on one unremarkable day. There were twelve other games played in the majors that day—and if you examine them closely, you’ll see how improbable each of them was. They were all rigged. They had to be. There’s simply no other explanation that makes any sense. The unlikelihoods pile on top of improbabilities on top of impossibilities.

But now that we’ve started our investigation, how can we stop? If one day’s worth of games are all fixed, we can see how the entire season consists of nothing but fixed games. But not just the 2008 season, either. Major league baseball turns out to be one enormous racket devised to defraud the general public into believing they’re watching honest sporting events.

And not just the major leagues are involved. There are far more minor league games played, all affronts to statistical reasoning. This is nothing but a massive conspiracy of worldwide proportions. And while we’re at it, we can’t ignore Little League. Be honest with me—is there ever anything more improbable than the outcome of a Little League game?

Let’s face it: Improbable things are happening all around us, all the time. Goldin Rule: Everything is improbable until it happens. (Granted, some things are more improbable than others. I’m willing to bet the Cubs will win the World Series before the Pope switches to atheism. But the other way around isn’t totally impossible.)

But if you refuse to accept improbabilities, if you believe that mere improbability without any other proof means there was some intelligent intervention involved, then you must accept the fact that every baseball game ever played—all the way back to Abner Doubleday—has bee fixed.

And let’s not even talk about lacrosse....