BP Daily Podcast

The statistical tool that you were looking for in your discussion of aces is basically an independent samples t-test. You are saying that you know the mean (each pitcher's ERA) and imposing some sort of distribution and then drawing randomly from those distributions. Basically the question that you are asking is that if Verlander is really better than... me, how often would we be able to detect that in a small sampling frame (1 game). That's a question of statistical power. (For the initiated, in a t-test, it's 1-beta.)