How many no-hitters in a season?
In baseball, a no-hitter is a game in which a pitcher does not allow the other team to get a hit. This is a rare event, and since the beginning of the so-called modern era of baseball (starting in 1901), there have only been 251 of them through the 2015 season in over 200,000 games. The ECDF of the number of no-hitters in a season is shown to the right. Which probability distribution would be appropriate to describe the number of no-hitters we would expect in a given season?
Note: The no-hitter data set was scraped and calculated from the data sets available at retrosheet.org (license).
Possible Answers
Discrete uniform
Both Binomial and Poisson, though Poisson is easier to model and compute.
Both Binomial and Poisson, though Binomial is easier to model and compute.