The golden ratio in baseball: the influence of historical eras on winning percentages in major league baseball

John Cairney; Stephen Townsend; Denver M Y Brown; Jeffrey D Graham; Veronique Richard; Matthew Y W Kwan

doi:10.3389/fspor.2023.1273327

The golden ratio in baseball: the influence of historical eras on winning percentages in major league baseball

Front Sports Act Living. 2023 Nov 14:5:1273327. doi: 10.3389/fspor.2023.1273327. eCollection 2023.

Authors

John Cairney^{1

2}, Stephen Townsend¹, Denver M Y Brown³, Jeffrey D Graham⁴, Veronique Richard^{1

2}, Matthew Y W Kwan⁴

Affiliations

¹ School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia.
² Health and Well-Being Centre for Research Innovation, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia.
³ College for Health Community and Policy, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, United States.
⁴ Department of Child and Youth Studies, Brock University, St Catharines, ON, Canada.

Abstract

Introduction: The golden section or golden ratio (61.8% or 0.618) is a mathematical phenomenon that appears in art, literature, music and nature with such ubiquity that it is thought to be a fundamental principle of aesthetic organisation. The golden ratio also manifests in sport, particularly as the proportion of wins to losses required to win a Major League Baseball championship. This study extends early work on the golden ratio in baseball by incorporating more than three decades of additional data.

Methods: This study involved a historically contextualized examination of how winning percentages have changed across the seven historical eras of modern baseball, including analyses of the relative contribution of offensive and defensive statistics to championship winning teams. Data was extracted from Baseball Reference and included statistics for 398 championship winning teams from both the American and National Leagues between 1901 and 2019. Pearson correlation coefficients were computed for winning percentage with indicators of offensive and defensive performance during each era. Main and interaction effects of Era and League on winning percentage were examined using factorial ANOVA, with follow-up analyses examining whether the golden ratio was included in each factor's 95% confidence interval.

Results: Our findings suggest that winning percentages for championship teams were closest to the golden ratio during eras where the relative contribution of offense and defense was most closely balanced: the Integration Era (1942-1960) and the Expansion Era (1961-1976).

Discussion: Previous scholarship theorizes that the golden ratio represents an aesthetic ideal or a Gestalt archetype. If this aesthetic theory is applied to sporting competition, these results suggest that baseball may be most aesthetically appealing to fans when offense and defense is balanced in such a way as to ensure that championship teams win 61.8% of their games.

Keywords: audience; baseball; championship; fans; golden section; history; statistics.

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare that no financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.