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The Atlanta Braves are currently the odds-on favorite to win the World Series, but they’ll have to beat the Phillies in the NLDS in order to keep those dreams alive. If you’re not a baseball fan, you might not care who comes out on top, but based on what’s transpired in the past, America might have a vested interest in making sure the trophy doesn’t end up in Philadelphia.
You don’t need to be an expert in statistics to know “correlation does not imply causation,” a phrase that’s frequently used to correct a widespread and elementary logical fallacy concerning cause and effect. With that said, it can still be pretty hard to ignore two trends that seem to be linked even when there’s absolutely no evidence they’re connected in any way.
That includes the one that was recently brought to my attention courtesy of The Messenger, which noted an MLB team bringing a World Series back to Philly seems to be a harbinger of economic doom in the United States.
We’re obviously working with a pretty small sample size when you consider the Phillies have only won the World Series twice in their 140 years of existence.
The first came when they beat the Royals in 1980, which preceded a 16-month recession that started in the summer of 1981 and came to an end in the fall of the following year. While The Great Recession stemming from the collapse of the subprime mortgage market had already begun by the time Philadelphia triumphed over the Rays in 2008, it got significantly worse in the wake of the World Series before easing in 2009.
However, we can also throw another baseball team that once called The City of Brotherly Love home into the mix in the form of the Philadelphia Athletics; in 1929, that squad beat the Cubs in the World Series just a couple of weeks before “Black Friday” ushered in The Great Depression.
Is it a pretty tenuous connection? Absolutely, but it never hurts to err on the side of caution, so while I have nothing against the Phillies, I might end up rooting against them on principle.