Quote:
Originally Posted by Tim
...and must be at least partly skill.
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I don't think any sensible person would ever say anything else. The issue is always about how
much skill, and I have no idea how you can ever figure that out.
Even baseball analysts can't work out how much luck/skill is involved for their game and there are more statistics collected for baseball than just about anything else on Earth I would guess.
Just to wind people up a bit more, you could make a case for baseball being far less skillful than football (I'm talking about soccer here, of course) by comparing the leagues.
I believe the typical MLB winner achieves about 65% wins with the worst team in the league achieving about 35%. By contrast, last years English Premiership saw the winner achieve approximately 75% wins with the worst team only winning 20% of their games.
You could therefore say that by having a more skillful team, the footballers can outgun their worst league opponents by almost 4 to 1 in terms of wins, but the best baseball players only achieve a 2 to 1 ratio and therefore there must be less skill in the game.
P.S. I know absolutely nothing at all about baseball (and not much more about soccer) but it does show the difficulty of figuring out how you'd assess the amount of skill in a sport or game - what criteria can you possibly use? It's a statistician's nightmare (or possibly a PhD thesis - hmm).
P.P.S. I still can't understand why people like baseball :)