HUMAN CAPITAL ANALYTICS: THE LEADING EDGE OF MEASUREMENT 169
that is relevant to my point is that Gould and Ed Purcell
(a Nobel laureate in physics), both of whom were baseball
fanatics, once conducted an exhaustive study of baseball
streaks and slumps. They found that all such runs fell within
reasonable probability except for one solitary instance: Joe
DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak in 1941. According
to probability statistics, it should not have happened at all.
Thus, it is the greatest achievement in baseball, if not all
sports. What few people know is that the day after his streak
was broken, he started another that lasted seventeen games.
Imagine a seventy-four-game streak! That is almost half a
season. Before that, he had a sixty-one-game ...