Science News Daily

NJIT prof sees 70 percent chance for Yanks to win the 2009 World Series

With the New York Yankees and Philadelphia Phillies having put game one of the Fall Classic in to the books, mathematicians have predicted a winner of this best-of-seven face-off. According to a applied mathematical frame work developed by New Jersey Institute of Technology mathematics professor Bruce Bukiet, the Bronx bombers have a 70.2 percent chance of winning. He says the most likely outcome (with a 22.6 percent chance) is a Yankees win in six games—a prediction that agrees with a number of online sports books that I could find. The Phillies' best chance? Winning it in seven games, with a 10.2 percent probability of that happening. Baseball is said to be a statistician's dream. It even has a field of statistical study—sabermetrics—that focuses entirely on baseball statistical and analytical tools. Prof. Bukiet starts with the regular season statistics for each player on the Yankees' and Phillies' roster and uses a Markov process to predict how they will do in the World Series. A Markov

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