Look at the list of pitchers who have thrown a perfect game, and some names jump out at you (at least if you are a basebal fan). Not for being the culmination of a great career (RJ, Koufax, Cy Young, etc.) but for being ridiculously improbable.For example:Len Barker - career record of 74-76 with an ERA of 4.34Mike Witt 117-116 3.83Don Larsen 81-91 3.78Tom Browning 123-90 3.94And that's out of only 15 perfectos since 1900. If you look at the list of no-hitters it is even more interesting.But then, look at GREAT pitchers who have never had a no-hitter. Roger Clemens, Greg Maddux just for example.Perfect games are incredibly rare, but no-hitters aren't (depending on your point of view I guess). But there is an average of 2 or 3 per year. Is that rare enough to be a "tail event". Should we surprised how many poor pitchers have them and how many great ones don't? Or is this about what should be expected?

I think it is certainly a tail event that sometimes "not-so-good" pitchers have one or two dominating games. On the other hand, great pitchers need not have to have perfect games or no hitters. Great pitchers get the job done. Their pitching style varies greatly. Sinker ball pitchers usually pitch to get people out on the weak infield grounders where as fastball/changeup combo usually pitches for strike outs. There is enormous factors that comes into play when you try to pitch a groundout style. Batter can layoff bad pitches, errors from the field, or just plain good infield hits that gets people on base. Some people might also criticize that certain perfect/no hitter games came from pitching to bottom feeding teams. What impressed me the most about the big unit's perfect game AND Jason Schmidts one hitter that night (also with 13 Ks) was that they did it to teams with good bats. But then again, I always liked baseball for great pitching more so than great hitting, so my opinion can be a little biased.

What I find interesting is a couple pitchers with multiple no-hitters.Virgil Trucks, 2 no-hitters in a year he went 5-19.Steve Busby won a total of 70 games, incuding TWO no-hitters.Now those are tail events!Nolan Ryan's seven still blows my mind.

QuoteNolan Ryan's seven still blows my mind.Agreed. That may be the most fascinating outlier in baseball "statistics".On another note; I love the idea of a perfect game, but why in the hell do they show them on ESPN Classic? Mmmm... 2.5 hours of routine ground balls!

Not to mention something like 12 one-hitters. Actually, Ryan kind of proves the rule. He pitched forever, so had many chances. He had a VERY low hits per 9 innings for his career, so you would expect someone like him to be the guy with many no-hitters. The same is true of Koufax, who had four.But, Ryan walked more than 4.6 guys per 9 innings, so to turn a no-hitter into a perfect game, for him, would be really unlikely. And of his 7 no-hitters, NONE were perfect games, so that makes sense.Koufax, on the other hand, had incredible control, and walked relatively few batters (2.3 per 9 during his "prime"). So, it seems more likely that at least one of his no-hitters would be a perfect game, and in fact one of them was.Also, and I say this with no proof, but it seems that the variability in walks would be much lower than that of hits, meaning lower standard deviation. Over the number of games he pitched it probably approaches Normal, but with fat tails, and more chance of being way low than way high (he'd get relieved if he gave up too many hits). So, one could almost solve for the probability that a given pitcher would have a no-hitter and/or perfect game. But when the expected value of number of no-nos/perfectos is pretty low, beating the E[x] by one, or being short by one is statistically meaningless.

ahh, finally an interesting topici'd love to hear you think is the greatest 'outlier' among sports statistics. i have 3 in mind. 1)byron nelson's 11 consecutive pga tour wins2)dimaggio's 56 game hitting streak3)michael johnson's 19.32 sec 200m at the atlanta games.personally, i think 1) has the least chance of being broken.any thoughts?

Johnny Van der Meer's back to back no-hitters.Byron Nelson, totally agree. I read somewhere he wanted to build a new home and really set out to win more events to be able to afford it. Then he won 11 in a row!I don't know #3, maybe Braves 12 straight playoff appearances?

Another thing that interests me is that perfect games seem to be more common lately. If the 15 in the last 100 years, over half (8) have occured since 1981 (23 years). But at the same time, baseball has undergone an offensive explosion since the 70s.So, how is that runs, HRs, hits, etc. are up across the board, and at the same time, perfect games are up? Is this just random?At the same time, no-hitters don't seem to be any more common, so a higher percentage of no-hitters are perfect games (I have no data on this, but might try to find some). That makes it seem like randomness, but maybe it's not...

Well, I think you are comparing two different things here. On average, offense is exploding across the board and it is easily seen by the increase on average in ERA on a lot of pitchers. However, when you compare perfect games to an offensive explosion, it isn't quiet apples to apples.I think a better explanation would be the advances of technology helping both pitchers and batters out in perfecting their form while at the same time being able to endure longer careers (especially pitchers) from wearing out their arm. The technological advances then should change the distribution of the game, making rare events less rare by having fatter tails.

di maggio's streak is always held up as THE outlier of sports.Nasser Hussain, the england cricket captain was on a 10 game streak losing the coion toss. i don't know when it ended, if it got any bigger or not but i suppose given the number of captains out there, one of them was bound to hit a massive losing streak.

Oh I found the REAL outlier.Kim Jong Il claims to have shot a 34 on a par 72 course, including 5 holes in one! "He told me that Kim Jong Il was a great golfer and that he went round the 18-hole course in 34 the only time he played there--the professional record is 59--including FIVE holes in one. What hack golfer wouldn't want a day out like that?" EDIT: I was assuming everyone knows Kim Jong Il is the leader of North Korea, but then decided to add this note in case anyone didn't make the connection.

Here's another link to this amazing event.Oh wait, he's full of crap and it never happened. Oh well....

Could someone place Joe di Maggio's feat in a statistical context, ie assuming each game to be an independent event, and ascribing reasonable a priori probabilities, what do we get as the cumulative probability of his run.I know its a bit unsatisfactory, but I guess its the only way that we can begin to compare such feats across sports.Arroway?

I think Paulos did that in one of his books, probably "Innumeracy". I'll have to see if I can find it.