Been a while since we did a Zen article.

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Bill James points out an interesting paradox on his site.  $3 for a month's reading, the value of which this pay article easily exceeds.

Bill notes that teams enter the season with a 1-in-15 chance to win their leagues, all things being equal.  But Texas and Tampa Bay entered their game with only a 1-in-16 chance to win the American League.

• Texas to beat Tampa Bay:  that's a coin flip, 50% chance
• Texas to then beat Cleveland in the Wild Card:  that's 50% of 50%, or a 25% chance
• Texas to then beat Boston in the ALDS:  that's half of the remaining 25%, or 12.5%, 1-in-8
• Texas to then beat Detroit in the ALCS:  half of 12.5%, or 6.25% 1-in-16

Does that make intuitive sense to you?  That any team in Texas' position -- though 9 teams were already eliminated -- that it would be in worse shape than it was to start the season?  There's a solution to the paradox, of course, and maybe somebody wants to explain it below.

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Anyway, the point is.  Almost all of the baseball people you listen to, hate the Wild Card game.  Danny Wilson was lamenting it, because it puts a team in a hole, needing to use its #1 starter to make the playoffs, and then being at a prohibitive disadvantage in the playoffs.  For those who weren't around then, this is exactly what happened to the Mariners in 1995, which was the year

• they beat the Yankees (Mariners suffered no prohibitive disadvantage)
• right after the 1994 strike alienated everybody 
• Dan Wilson had his career year
• Randy Johnson (in that "wild card" game) pitched what was, for me, the most satisfying game in my entire baseball life

Bill James, and I, love love LOVE the fact that Wild Card teams have their entries devalued.  Win the division or stop whinin', brudda.

Teams need to feel shrill about winning their divisions outright.  They should view the Wild Card game as a desperate grab at a life preserver.  Personally, that's all right by me.

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Figured out that paradox yet?  Is that really true, that a team in Texas and Tampa Bay were worse off on Sept. 30 -- with 19 major league teams cleaning out their lockers --  than they were on Opening Day?

Not just "worse off compared to Texas' expectations."  Rather, "worse off from the point of view of a drone team."

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A few of my own favorite paradoxes:

Fermi's Paradox:  Aliens must have colonized the Milky Way by now.  Yet, they have not.  (It takes at most 5 million years, after first space flight, to colonize the galaxy - this colonization time represents only 1/3000th of the galaxy's age.)

Love:  Ultimate happiness comes in a situation in which one loses concern for one's happiness.

Sentience:  a collection of biological cells cannot create a whole that is greater than the sum of their parts (cf. computer intelligence).  Yet, they do.  Many scientists regard consciousness as the greatest paradox in the universe.

Schroedinger's Cat

Paradox of Shame and Guilt:  Shame cannot have provided a next-generation evolutionary advantage.  Yet, it did.

Biological Enrichment:  Radically increasing the food to an ecosystem typically causes total extinction.

Crop Circles:  Cause X, Cause Y, and Cause Z could not (taken individually) have possibly have created the diagrams.  Yet, one of them did.

Twin Paradox:  Classic relativity problem.  A twin taking a round trip at near-C will return younger than his brother.

Heat Death Paradox:  According to the 1st and 2nd Laws of Thermodynamics - the principle of increasing energy disorder in any system - the universe must be finitely old.  Yet, it cannot be, or it would have met its heat death eons ago.

Archimedes Paradox - a battleship would float in a few hundred gallons of water, if the water were in a hull-shaped bowl -- the battleship doesn't "know" there isn't an ocean under the layer of water

Ship of Theseus - replace a ship 1 board at a time and it is still the same ship.  You could then assemble the same ship from the removed parts.  Solve this, and you solve questions of soul and identity.  Also goes to the question of a lot of baseball rosters assembled by the New York Yankees.

Note, by the way, that every cell in your body is different from the one in it 10 years ago - and it's perfectly feasible to imagine 23rd-century science pulling off The Second Ship of Theseus with respect to your body.  :- ) 

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I dunno what the Rangers' chance was, going into the Tampa game, but would it be good enough for the 2014 Mariners?