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Winner And Loser Effects In Major League Baseball Double Headers, Andrew C. Gallup, Omar T. Eldakar

Biology Faculty Articles

Across the animal kingdom it has been observed that outcomes of conflicts are influenced by past experiences, whereby previous winners are likely to keep winning and losers are likely to lose again. These so-called “winner and loser effects” are hypothesized to result from factors such as information acquisition and endocrine responses following the initial bouts. This paper applies the understanding of this phenomenon to a novel domain: patterns of winning and losing in Major League Baseball (MLB) double headers. By accessing archival data available from www.espn.com, we report on the incidence of a single team winning both games (sweeps) versus …