You Shouldn't Grade Coincidences (Unless You're a Jerk)

In the middle of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, which is a play that hinges on a wild sequence of coincidences, Fabian comments on the madness: "if this were played on a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction" and I'm sure this same idea flashed across the collective consciousness of millions of baseball fans last Thursday night when Derek Jeter, during his final at bat in Yankee stadium, drove in the game winning run in the bottom of the ninth inning with a walk-off single . . . it seemed too perfect, an "improbable fiction," but-- as Shakespeare well knew-- coincidences happen all the time . . . they are a product of statistical likelihood-- but no one wants to hear about probability if the event in question happened to them personally . . . no one wants their coincidence "graded" because if the coincidence happened to you, then you believe it is special; for example, my wife saw a car the other day with four bumper stickers, each advertising a geographical location: Highland Park, Ireland, Ocean Grove, and Chatham, and she thought it was especially coincidental that she had been to all four of those places but I argued that people who had been to two of them had likely been to all four, and that an astronomical number of people saw the back of this car-- because we live in a densely populated state-- and that many of them had the same experience as her, thus diluting the uniqueness of her coincidence, but this didn't matter to my wife, who found the event special from her point of view . . . if you like this topic, then you'll love the Radiolab podcast A Very Lucky Wind, which explores coincidence in both a rational and emotional manner . . . and includes a metaphor which ruined my older son's appreciation of the magic of coincidences; a golfer drives a ball out onto the fairway and it lands on a particular blade of grass and this blade of grass cannot believe that he's been selected out of all the blades of grass in the world, that the ball landed on him, but from our point of view, this isn't special at all, because the ball had to land somewhere . . . so when one of the players on my son's soccer team expressed his amazement at the fact that the guy who moved in next door to him had the exact same name as him, my son Alex was not particularly moved by this event and later said to me, "it's like the golf ball and the blade of grass, people are moving all over the place and eventually someone is going to move next to another person with the same name."

10 comments:

zman said...

I wonder if your wife wonders why she married you when you give her a hard time about bumper stickers and pass similar didactic behavior onto your kids.

Al DePantsdowno said...

Dave. Ruiner of all that is magical.

00stoll said...

Also, that pitch was grooved.

Clarence said...

I have been to Highland Park and Chatham but neither Ocean Grove nor Ireland. The argument that "people who had been to two of them had likely been to all four" is entirely baseless. You just like popping the balloon on anything that seems cool.

SBNation called Jeter's hit a "classy, gritty chopper of an infield RBI single." Barf. It was a lousy chopper that benefited from (a) Jeter missing more of the ball than hitting it, as he hit the hard dirt rather than the soft infield grass, enabling that eephus bounce, and (b) the 3B dropping the ball.

It also wasn't that improbable for a guy with a lifetime .300 BA to get a single, let's call it a 30% chance. The improbability would have been if the Yankees had been good and Jeter had once again won a meaningful game with it. Give Jeter credit, despite some folks' labored efforts to prove that there is no such thing as a clutch hitter (people like Dave do that), Jeter has always had a sense of the moment and come up big.

zman said...

Alternatively, much of Jeter's life is an improbable fiction that really happened.

Dave said...

the anti-clutch shooter evidence is fairly well-documented . . . i still like to believe it exists but the evidence says otherwise.

zman said...

By anti-clutch shooter do you mean nick Anderson?

Clarence said...

Nearly 20 years and Zman is still piling on.

rob said...

dave and the pedantic didacts would be a band name.

Dave said...

i like it! but where could i find a backing band of pedantic didacts.

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