10,000 Alternate Joe DiMaggios can’t be wrong
March 31st, 2008
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This New York Times article, “A Journey to Baseball’s Alternate Universe,” is the kind of thing that almost makes me wish I enjoyed math. Almost.
In a fit of scientific skepticism, we decided to calculate how unlikely Joltin’ Joe’s [56-game hitting streak] really was. Using a comprehensive collection of baseball statistics from 1871 to 2005, we simulated the entire history of baseball 10,000 times in a computer. In essence, we programmed the computer to construct an enormous set of parallel baseball universes, all with the same players but subject to the vagaries of chance in each one.
Although it doesn’t quite set free my inner mathematician, it does bring out the writer in me, that little inner voice that says “What if . . .?”
What if one of those 10,000 alternate Joe DiMaggios — one who was less successful in baseball and didn’t marry Marilyn Monroe — slipped through the dimensional interface into the universe where Joe DiMaggio is the baseball legend that he is in ours? Or vice versa?
Crap. Now I’m gonna have to go read a DiMaggio biography.