The Boston Red Sox, one of the top teams in major league US baseball won the World Series this week–the first time in 86 years. The questions are: did they have a run of extreme bad luck? can we identify any extraordinary skill that led to their win or was such a reversal of fortune inevitable? Would it be fairer to say that, at some point in time, whether the team was good or bad on the day, given their overall calibre, that duck over 86 years would be broken some time, by some manager, without any magic ingredients to analyse.

Harvard Business School’s Mary Ross Kantor has done a study of winning and losing streaks in business and sport and is confident enough to draw some conclusions in a book, and recent lecture to the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council. That she cites the overconfident (and now failed) Greg Dyke’s adventure at the BBC as an example of a successful turnaround should make us a little skeptical. However…

I’m not a baseball fan. When I’ve watched it, I’ve found it hard to follow, but unlike most sports it does contain a high degree of drama because, it seems to be a game designed to create more than its fair share of luck, both good and bad. As a consequence, it seems to be more intensely psychological.

This last factor may explain how the Red Sox run of bad luck could be so consistent and last for so long. It was not confined to just World Series failure. The club has a record of bottling it in a lot of crucial matches. Confidence may be the most crucial factor. As for the World Series, the superstitious have blamed failure on the curse of Babe Ruth, the greatest player of all time, who was sold to the Yankees, and since when the run of bad luck began.

Another interesting factor may be that the team was owned by the same family trust for 69 years. Noone has owned a major league team that long without winning a championship. Finally the team was sold in 2002.

If nerves can play a greater than usual part in a game, then the notion of such a curse can have a powerful and lasting impact, through the concept of the “self-fulfilling prophecy.” When confidence is lost in this way, a self-reinforcing process exerts itself and in business, this can lead to disaster. Reversing it is not at all easy.

Interesting points to note about the Red Sox are that coach Terry Francona was new to the club this year. He was an unsuccessful player for Philadelphia in the 1980s, suggesting an understanding of what an underperforming player needs to get out of a trough and become inspired. He stood up to belligerent players. It seems to be a team of mavericks both in behaviour and appearance. This kind of talent could easily wreck a team, so it would be very easy for a manager to exclude them. Francona supported the mediocre players when they hit a soft patch mid-season, a time that many teams might have desolved into recrimination.

Another interesting vignette is that the general manager Theo Epstein (grandson of the screen writer of Casablanca) is the youngest GM in the league (ever I think). He was a star pupil who sidelined in baseball management while at college, working 70-hour weeks with the San Diego Padres as he studied there at Law School. According to the London Times, Epstein subscribes to the Sabermetrics school of baseball management, made famous by the Oakland ‘As’ in a book by Michael Lewis called Moneyball, author of Liar’s Poker. More on that when I’ve read it.

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