It’s that time of the year when Little League World Series coverage heats up on ESPN, and viewers get to see a miniaturized version of baseball played at the highest level. This year has been especially impressive with a super-team from Las Vegas that rarely makes errors, the Chicago team that beat them, and of course the sensational female pitcher Mo’ne Davis, who throws as hard as some high school pitchers. Every Little Leaguer dreams of making it to the big leagues, someday making a career of playing the game they love. But how hard is it to get there? This is a question that we will try to solve this week with the help of a spreadsheet.
One note – we’re not trying to destroy anyone’s dreams here… As Andy Dusfrene wrote in Shawshank Redemption
“Remember, Red. Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. I will be hoping that this letter finds you, and finds you well. Your friend, Andy.” Striving for one’s dreams is great, but our spreadsheet will give a sense of the cold probability.
First we need some inputs:
1) The total number of Little Leaguers: This Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article says “As for Little League, which covers kids aged 4 to 18, about two million kids played in the U.S. last year, compared to about 2.5 million in 1996—an overall decline of 25%.” Well, at least it could be a little easier now with the lighter competition…
2) The total number of Major League Baseball (MLB) Players: There are 32 teams and 25 players on the active roster for each team = 800 players.
3) How many of these MLB players are from the US: Little Leaguers from the US have to compete with the best international players to make it to the big leagues. 28% of the players in the MLB are from other countries, so 72% from the US. The data can be found in this MLB Press Release.
The (very simple and estimated) spreadsheet and problem solving process:
So we know that 2.5 million Little Leaguers from 1996, aged 4-18 have turned into Major Leaguers today (minimum salary $500k). We have to normalize this figure to number per year – sort of the same problem with trying to figure out how your chances of nabbing one of Harvard’s 6,655 undergrad spots but only knowing the total number of elementary school students. We know the meaty part of Little League is around 6-14, before people start to specialize in their respective sports. So we get about 278k Little Leaguers per year.
The meaty part of the Major League Baseball age curve is 24-30, which gives about 82 per year from the US.
We take this and divide by the total, which gives us a 0.0296% chance, which is about 1 in 3,376. Better than the chance of getting hit by lightning! (1 in 6,250).
To access the spreadsheet in Google Spreadsheet or Microsoft Excel, please click below:
- Google Spreadsheet: Little League Google Spreadsheet
- Excel: Little League Excel Spreadsheet
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