On Luck

"I never knew an early-rising, hardworking, prudent man, careful of his earnings and strictly honest, who complained of bad luck. A good character, good habits and iron industry are impregnable to the assaults of all the ill luck that fools ever dreamed of." Joseph Addison

Don't ask me who Addison was. I got that out of a quote book. All I know about Addison is that there's a street named after him near Wrigley Field--that and the observation that he appears to have been a self-righteous asshole. In the sports world the most famous quote about luck is Branch Rickey's: "Luck is the residue of design." One has to say, in fairness to Rickey, that he didn't get it nearly as wrong as Addison. Luck is not something left over when all our plans have been implemented. Luck is a beast that jumps into the middle of our plans and kicks the snot out of them. Plans are rabbits; luck is a hungry wolf.

It has been suggested that statisticians don't believe in luck. What are you, nuts? Statisticians see luck as an Eskimo sees snow, a paranoiac sees enemies, a banker sees money. To a statistician, luck is so much a part of our environment that we have difficulty being certain there is anything else. We tend to see everything as if it were built mostly of luck.

Your average sports fan underestimates the power of luck by a factor of dozens, your average athlete by a factor of hundreds. If you ask a baseball fan, "Is it possible for an average pitcher to win 20 games just because he is lucky?" most likely he will scoff at the idea. In reality an average pitcher winning 20 games is not only possible, it's fairly common.

They say chance favors those who are prepared for it. Well, yes and no. In sports, luck always favors the less skilled athlete, since without luck the lesser team would win only when the better team has a breakdown. Perhaps statisticians are keen on luck because we are such bad athletes. When I was a young man I was the worst athlete in the world, but I am six-foot-four and attended high school in a small town, so I got to play a little bit of basketball. Usually I did okay at rebounding because I was bigger than anybody else on the floor, but I remember one game in which the other team had these two guys: One was six-foot-six and a lot stronger than I was, and the other was six-foot-five and could jump.

I knew I had no chance banging against those guys, so I just leaned into one of them until the shot was in the air and then bounced out four or five feet in case there was a long rebound. In about five minutes I had policed up three or four long rebounds. I thought I was doing great, until halftime came and the coach lit into me as if I had dishonored his mother. "Get in there and fight for those rebounds," he screamed.

Some people say they would rather be lucky than good. I would rather be good than lucky, but unfortunately I wasn't lucky enough to be good. I was lousy. I was smart enough to realize, however, that even though I was lousy I still might get lucky. If I got away from those guys the ball might bounce in my direction; whereas if I tried to tussle with them, the best possible outcome would be my not needing surgery.

Coaches don't believe in luck, because they can't afford to rely on it. This is too kind. Coaches don't believe in luck mostly because they are ex-athletes. The coach didn't understand my perspective, because he had never been that guy who was just too damn slow to win a rebound battle. If you ask an athlete whether it is possible for a below-average team to win the pennant in baseball just by dumb luck, you'll be lucky if he doesn't punch you. Athletes are trained not to believe in luck. The guy who wins always believes he has won because he deserved to win, because he worked hard and was smart and had real intestinal fortitude. Winners are not inclined to think they won because they were lucky. I'm not saying the White Sox won last year because of luck--not at all. It takes a lot of skill to make the umpire and the opposing catcher both screw up the same play.

Ecclesiastes gets it exactly right: "The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."

Of course, there are limits to the power of luck. If the Kansas City Royals had an ocean of good fortune, they would probably just drown in it. There are limits to the power of good luck; I'm not sure there are limits to the power of bad luck. Is it possible for a team's luck to be so bad that, let's say, the Yankees could finish last even though they really are the best team in the league?

Sure it is--all it takes is one car wreck and a pulled hamstring or two. We think of luck as being a bunt that rolls foul, a hard smash with a fielder standing right in front of it, a blown call that goes against us, a windblown homer or a long rebound that bounces our way. When luck reaches a certain level we stop thinking about it as luck and we start thinking about it as just the way things are. People think the Red Sox were really smart for signing David Ortiz. But I was there when the decision was made, and I know we were as much lucky as smart. We could just as easily have gone after another guy, who is now out of baseball. We signed Ortiz and he turned out to be great, so we don't think about that as being lucky anymore; we just think we're really good. The truth is, we are lucky to be so good.