Simulating Major League Baseball 

  Here  is a neat application of simulation from this weekend's New York Times.  The authors, a graduate student and professor at Cornell, simulated the entire history of Major League Baseball 10,000 times to see just how "mythic" Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak really is.  They find that 56-game streaks are not at all unusual, and furthermore that Joe DiMaggio wasn't even the most likely to set the record!   

 For those who are interested in doing some simulations of their own, my guess is that the authors used the  Lahman Baseball Database , which is freely available online.  Perhaps in some future post I'll take a look at some simulations of other baseball records.  Any suggestions for what to look at?