Luck, Shmuck: Baseball’s Luckiest Cities

A very lucky person’s backyard.

Men’s Health magazine went and ranked the luckiest cities in America earlier this month. Spoiler Alert — San Diego won, joining Baltimore as the only two cities in America with A+ luck. They defined luck as:

the most winners of Powerball, Mega Millions, and Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes; most hole-in-ones (PGA); fewest lightning strikes (including the fatal kind) and deaths from falling objects (Vaisala Inc., National Climatic Data Center, CDC); and least money lost on lottery tickets and race betting (Bureau of Labor Statistics).

Really, now we know that people in San Diego are rich enough to ignore lotteries, play a lot of golf, and stay indoors during the rare thurnderstorm. Is it really luck if San Diego is where people go after they win lottery?

We baseball lovers have a different idea of luck. A simple running of the pythagorean expectation over the past five years gives us a leader- and laggard-board for baseball luck. San Diego missed both extremes, winning 47.8% of their games when they should have won 48.2%.

We’ll have to strike Los Angeles from the list since they appear on both sides. And really, that goes for Chicago too, since the Cubs have shown a worse record than they might have expected given their runs scored and runs allowed. The Astros have been surprisingly lucky in one sense — they’ve won more than they should have — but then again they still didn’t manage a .500 record, and Men’s Health gives the city a C+. The magazine think Milwaukee is only worth a passing grade when it comes to luck.

But Phoenix? Oh, Phoenix. The luckiest of all cities once baseball luck is figured in, Phoenix boasts 70 degree weather in February and is apparently full of lottery winners and good golfers. There might be one strip mall too many, and the city might stretch without geographic marker across the desert valley, but they are a lucky gathering of people in a sunny part of the world.

And no list of the lucky would be complete without spotting the unluckiest. The Blue Jays are unAmerican by definition, the Dodgers share Los Angeles, and Denver was rated as having B- level luck by Men’s Health. The Athletics have not been treated well by lady luck, but Oakland itself is neutral otherwise (C).

But we do have two cities that have been unlucky in spades down there on the bottom of the list: Boston and Atlanta. Yes, Boston (D) and Atlanta (D+) are unlucky on and off the field.

Then again, we kind of saw that already this year, didn’t we?