Baseball

The Cubs play the St. Louis Cardinals tonight. I remain a loyal Cub fan, but I fear that the Cards will pound the final nail into the coffin known as the Cubs 2005 baseball season. I inspected the standings a couple of days ago and the way I figured it was that the Cubs would need to play over .600 baseball for the rest of the season to have a shot at the Wild Card spot.

What is the probability that a team, who has played .500 baseball for almost 100 games, can play over .600 baseball in their remaining 60 plus games? I don't know, but I expect it is not good. Rather than taking pencil, paper, and the calculator in hand to work it out, I think I'll just run through a few Monte Carlo simulations on the computer to see what it shows.

The Red Sox are in town playing the White Sox (best record in baseball). The White Sox lost a 6-5 heartbreaker to the Red Sox last night. The White Sox committed an unaccustomed three errors during the game. The third error, a dropped foul ball by third baseman Joe Crede, led to a Manny Ramirez solo shot that won the game.

I have a ticket to tonight's Sox vs. Sox game.