Momentum myth

It’s about baseball, but you’ll see why I like it

While it is possible that momentum is a real thing, and that even at the Major League level, the results of a game played the previous day will have some real but undetectable impact on the next game, the data for this is scanty.  Moreover, when momentum is used to explain everything in the post-season, it loses its meaning.  More simply, if momentum can shift several times in a series, game or even an inning, it is not really momentum at all, but something else.  For example, the San Francisco Giants surprised many this year by winning the World Series with a remarkable 11-4 record in the post-season.  A lazy person’s explanation for this would be that as the post-season went on, the Giants gained increasingly more momentum.  This is untestable, tautological and is not a real explanation of the Giants success.  Moving away from the momentum paradigm might shed light on the real reason for the Giants success, which as everybody knows was largely their extraordinary pitching.