[truantbuick]

The Astros hid behind the guise that they were outstanding at picking up "tipping" from opposing pitchers. i.e. The smallest difference in a pitcher's delivery, imperceptible to you or I, would indicate what kind of pitch was coming. Writers often talked about how Alex Cora or Carlos Beltran or Jose Altuve were just remarkable "students of the game" and would figure it out and tell the rest of the lineup who would pounce upon it.

It's kinda funny to look back on, because I remember lots of people producing videos where they would supposedly point out what the Astros were picking up on, and it never seemed very clear to me no matter how much they slowed down the footage.

Another thing to note is that there's always fun baseball stats coming out. Kershaw getting no misses on his breaking balls would just be one of several interesting tidbits talked about the next day. It wouldn't really cause suspicion, as most people would just assume it indicates Kershaw was ineffective.

For example, in the the 2017 ALCS, Astros pitcher Lance McCullers finished off the feared Yankees lineup by throwing 24 straight curveballs. This is no suggestion that Lance McCullers cheated; it's just an example that there's always odd stuff to reflect upon the next day.

[agarden]

Trevor Bauer has been loudly stating that the Astros' pitchers are using foreign substances on the ball to get the tremendous spin rates that they do. McCullers throwing 24 straight curveballs might in fact be suspicious.

[jahlove]

Pitchers using stickum is pretty much an open secret that the entire league participates in [0].

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/baseballs-st...

[sk5t]

I feel like the game tolerates some bending of the rules so long as the techniques were available and used in the 1920s--tar or earwax or whatever on the ball, a certain amount of incorrect calls from the umpire, and so on.

[gfs]

You're right, baseball has a statistic for everything so it's not always going to be caught. I forgot about that McCullers game. His curve was on another level that day!

[LeifCarrotson]

A statistic for everything, but little statistical or scientific literacy: so much data dredging goes on. When someone floats a number like "51 breaking balls with zero missed swings" or "24 straight curveballs" it's never presented with the rate at which this would be expected to occur in the pseudorandom/typical case.

There are close to a million pitches thrown in each season. If someone flipped a coin for every pitch in the 2000s, they would probably get a string of 24 head and a string of 24 tails. Given the number of pitches that have been thrown, and the human tendency to stick with what's working, the only reason that there wouldn't be 24 of one pitch thrown in a row is that they'd deliberately change it up.

[mattkrause]

Probably not quite 24 heads (or tails), but close!

I had to dig into this for work, and doing statistics on runs is surprisingly interesting. Suppose you've got a sequence of $n$ events, each of which 'succeeds' with probability $p$. The expected length of the longest run is approximately $\log_{1/p}(n*(1-p) + 0.577 \ln(1/p) - 1/2$. For a fair coin with $p$ = 0.5, this reduces to log_2(n) - 2/3, which is about 19 for one million events. Amazingly, the variance only weakly depends on n, but is about 2 for p=0.5.

Thus, you're probably not going to see a 24 head run in 1M events. I'm excited I got to use this information, as the project I learned it for was a total bust.

More here: Shilling (1990, College Math. J.) https://www.csun.edu/~hcmth031/tlroh.pdf

[LeifCarrotson]

It's just 2^24 for probability 1/2, right?

[aplummer]

It’s a different calculation Matt is doing. You are calculating the probability of that run happening now. Matt is calculating the expected length of the longest run in 1 million tosses.

[mattkrause]

Exactly! (Thanks!)

The distinction is important because a sequence of ten heads seems 'rare' in isolation. However, it is not particularly unusual when you go looking for it as a subsequence of some bigger set of trials.

[supercanuck]

You only need it spelled out if you aren’t very familiar with Major league Baseball. What you are saying is implied.

kershaw’s curveball is considered one of the best curveball’s in baseball.

To get zero swing and miss, is quite a special feat.

[mvbma2]

Maybe Beltran realized he had to resort to cheating after this Game 7 NL championship series embarrassment

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tWNe6cMsdsI

[goatherders]

Link to the astros claiming they were catching tips? Everything I have read was the opponents saying that.

[dwighttk]

https://www.si.com/mlb/2017/12/12/dodgers-yu-darvish-tipped-...

>Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci spoke with an Astros player who explained how they knew what was coming...