win much more often than it loses. The latter is more the case in basketball, for various reasons, including that many more points are scored than in baseball (giving the team with higher quality more opportunities to demonstrate that quality, with correspondingly fewer opportunities for chance or luck to allow the lower-quality team to win.) Baseball has just the right amount of chance in it to enable teams to win roughly in proportion to their quality, i.e. to produce a roughly Pythagorean result with exponent two. Basketball's higher exponent of around 14 (see below) is due to the smaller role that chance plays in basketball. The fact that the most accurate (constant) Pythagorean exponent for baseball is around 1.83, slightly less than 2, can be explained by the fact that there is (apparently) slightly more chance in baseball than would allow teams to win in precise proportion to their quality. Bill James realized this long ago when noting that an improvement in accuracy on his original Pythagorean formula with exponent two could be realized by simply adding some constant number to the numerator, and twice the constant to the denominator. This moves the result slightly closer to .500, which is what a slightly larger role for chance would do, and what using the exponent of 1.83 (or any positive exponent less than two) does as well. Various candidates for that constant can be tried to see what gives a "best fit" to real life data. The fact that the most accurate exponent for baseball Pythagorean formulas is a variable that is dependent on the total runs per game is also explainable by the role of chance, since the more total runs scored, the less likely it is that the result will be due to chance, rather than to the higher quality of the winning team having been manifested during the scoring opportunities. The larger the exponent, the farther away from a .500 winning percentage is the result of the corresponding Pythagorean formula, which is the same effect that a decreased role of chance creates. The fact that accurate formulas for variable exponents yield larger exponents as the total runs per game increases is thus in agreement with an understanding of the role that chance plays in sports. In his 1981 Baseball Abstract, James explicitly developed another of his formulas, called the log5 formula (which has since proven to be empirically