![\"longestStreakPerSeason.s\"](\"http:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/longestStreakPerSeason.s.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe New York Mets recently won 11 games in a row, which got a lot of attention.<\/p>\n
How likely is it that a given baseball team will win 11 games in a row by chance, if its probability of winning a single game is 50%?<\/p>\n
The plot below shows that if a baseball team plays 100 seasons of 162 games, they’ll have an streak of 11 wins in a row about 7 to 8 times a century (about every 13 years on average). If they’re a really good team that wins 60% of the time in the long run, they’ll have an 11 game winning streak 55 times per century (about every 2 years).<\/p>\n
Streaks aren’t weird, they’re expected. The graph up top shows that for a team that wins 50% of the time, the most likely outcome is that they’ll have a six game winning streak in a typical 162 game season. There’s an 8% chance their longest streak in a season will be 10 wins or more.<\/p>\n
For the gifted team that wins 60% of the time, an eight game winning streak is the most likely outcome in a season, and there’s a 32% chance they’ll have a streak of 10 wins or more.<\/p>\n
Fans of R and ggplot2 can reproduce the plots with the code below.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n