Are Minnesota sports teams cursed?
MINNEAPOLIS — Until this week, the Minnesota Twins went O and 18 in the postseason. That's a record-long postseason skid.
There's no doubt, it's been awhile since Minnesota has seen a championship. So, could we be cursed?
WCCO spoke with Vittorio Addona, who has been a statistics professor at St. Paul's Macalester College since 2005. And by the way, he doesn't believe in curses.
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"I think that people are easily convinced that they're seeing something anomalous," Addona said.
Like the stats in a viral video that uses Las Vegas odds to predict the Twins 18-game playoff losing streak.
"The mechanics of these calculations is not wrong," he said. "[But] it's not a fair question."
He says instead of choosing 18 specific games after the fact, look forward and ask what the chances are the Twins would lose the next 18 games.
And what about the data we choose?
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"We start in 1992 because that kind of fits this narrative," he said. "We focus on men's championships, right?"
And Addona also asks: Why should we focus on championships as our metric of success?
"Seeing zero championships in 30 years for one team is actually not that anomalous," he said. "It might be hard to swallow."
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