[0] https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/baseballs-st...
There are close to a million pitches thrown in each season. If someone flipped a coin for every pitch in the 2000s, they would probably get a string of 24 head and a string of 24 tails. Given the number of pitches that have been thrown, and the human tendency to stick with what's working, the only reason that there wouldn't be 24 of one pitch thrown in a row is that they'd deliberately change it up.
I had to dig into this for work, and doing statistics on runs is surprisingly interesting. Suppose you've got a sequence of $n$ events, each of which 'succeeds' with probability $p$. The expected length of the longest run is approximately $\log_{1/p}(n*(1-p) + 0.577 \ln(1/p) - 1/2$. For a fair coin with $p$ = 0.5, this reduces to log_2(n) - 2/3, which is about 19 for one million events. Amazingly, the variance only weakly depends on n, but is about 2 for p=0.5.
Thus, you're probably not going to see a 24 head run in 1M events. I'm excited I got to use this information, as the project I learned it for was a total bust.
More here: Shilling (1990, College Math. J.) https://www.csun.edu/~hcmth031/tlroh.pdf
The distinction is important because a sequence of ten heads seems 'rare' in isolation. However, it is not particularly unusual when you go looking for it as a subsequence of some bigger set of trials.
kershaw’s curveball is considered one of the best curveball’s in baseball.
To get zero swing and miss, is quite a special feat.
>Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci spoke with an Astros player who explained how they knew what was coming...
It's kinda funny to look back on, because I remember lots of people producing videos where they would supposedly point out what the Astros were picking up on, and it never seemed very clear to me no matter how much they slowed down the footage.
Another thing to note is that there's always fun baseball stats coming out. Kershaw getting no misses on his breaking balls would just be one of several interesting tidbits talked about the next day. It wouldn't really cause suspicion, as most people would just assume it indicates Kershaw was ineffective.
For example, in the the 2017 ALCS, Astros pitcher Lance McCullers finished off the feared Yankees lineup by throwing 24 straight curveballs. This is no suggestion that Lance McCullers cheated; it's just an example that there's always odd stuff to reflect upon the next day.