Grin Probability

“This season, ESPN announced that a special graphic would appear on all of its Major League Baseball telecasts. In the upper-left corner of the screen, just above the score, each team’s chance of winning the game is expressed as a percentage—a whole number, reassuring in its roundness, that is recalculated after every at-bat … You might think that so insistently reminding fans of their team’s ‘Win Probability’ would be against ESPN’s interests. If your team is down by several runs in the eighth inning, your hopes will already be fading. But to see that sinking feeling represented on the screen, in a crisp and precise-sounding 4 percent, could make an early bedtime more enticing. The producers of reality shows such as The Amazing Race know this, which is why they use quick cuts and split screens to deceive fans into thinking that teams are closer than they really are, and that the outcome is less certain than it really is. But ESPN has a more evolved consumer in mind. We got a clue as to who this person might be in March, when Phil Orlins, a vice president of production at the company, previewed the graphic. Orlins said that Win Probability would speak “to the way people think about sports right now,” especially people ‘who have a wager on the game.'” Ross Andersen in The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Scourge of ‘Win Probability’ in Sports. (I totally ignore those AI-powered numbers and stick with the model that’s always worked for me: Grin Probability: My desire for a team to lose is inversely proportional to the chances that team will end up winning. For example, the Dodgers won 9-0 over the Mets last night and haven’t given up a single run for 33 innings.)