This is Scientific American's 60-second Science, I'm Steve Mirsky.With a full month of the regular season to play, the 2019 New York Yankees had set a Major League Baseball record for injuries.That medical crisis led to what the online sports publication The Athletic reported on January 3rdas "sweeping changes" to their training and strength-and-conditioning programs.When I read that news, I thought, of course, of traffic cameras,which sometimes, and reasonably, get placed at sites that have a disproportionate number of accidents in a given year."The fact that there's a higher rate of accidents will be partly due to chance because it will fluctuate over the course of time.Sometimes it will be less; sometimes it will be high."David J. Hand, on the Scientific American Science Talk podcast in 2014.He's emeritus professor of mathematics and senior research investigator at Imperial College London,where he formerly held the chair in statistics.He was on the podcast to talk about then new book The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day.So what does the Yankees' revamped training staff potentially have in common with traffic cameras?"Now if we look back at last year and identify the places which have particularly high rates of accidents,the high rate of those places will be due to a sum of two things:the natural degree of dangerousness of those places,plus the fact that that particular year just happens to be a bad year―there were more accidents than normal at that year.
