Number crunching: Major League baseball favors the underdog (lets play 256 games!)

As if the baseball season isn't long enough.

According to physicists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in order to guarantee that the best team in baseball actually wins the World Series teams would need to play 256 games per team, well beyond the 162 games each Major League Baseball team currently plays in the regular season.

According to the physicists' analysis and simulations of league play, there is always at least some chance that a lesser team can prevail in any given game.

The randomness of such outcomes means that it takes a large number of games to guarantee that the best team accumulates the most wins. The randomness of course also ensures that the thrill of the sport and the occasional underdog gets to prevail.

Specifically, the researchers says in order to make sure the best team wins the total number of games played in a season should be roughly the cube of the number of teams involved.

For the 16 team National League, that means 4096 regular season games altogether and 2744 games for the 14 team American League.

In their report, "Effiency of Competitions," researchers said the world of sports provides an ideal laboratory for modeling competition because game data are accurate, abundant, and accessible.

Sports nicely demonstrate that the outcome of a single competition is not predictable. Over the past century the lower seeded team had an astounding 44% chance of defeating a higher seeded team in baseball.

This inherent randomness has profound consequences. Even after a long series of competitions, the best team does not always win, the researchers said.

Some, arguably most, fans might prefer things the way they are, with underdogs such as the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals and 2003 Florida Marlins having a shot at winning the Word Series.

For those who would rather the title only go to the very best team in any given year, a modified schedule could get the job done with many fewer games, according to the physicists.

The researchers suggest by adding a preliminary round to the season, and eliminating the weakest teams before regular league play begins, the physicists showed that the best team in the National League would be virtually guaranteed to be among the top two or three teams with the best records, even with a significantly reduced number of games.

Although the very best team may not always end up in the lead, a preliminary round or two would at least ensure that the top teams aren't eliminated from the playoffs through simple bad luck.

Although the baseball schedule is far from perfect, according to the new research, the relatively large number of games that the teams play each year results in better sorting than occurs in professional football, hockey, and basketball.

The National Football League, for example has comparable numbers of teams to Major League Baseball, but plays far fewer games each year, which makes the pro football season outcome much more random.