Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2018 February 9

= February 9 =

Sports teams wearing red
Around a whole lotta years ago, I remember seeing a copy of Manwatching by Desmond Morris. We don't seem to have an article about the book, which is surprising, as I think it was pretty influential ( not least for giving pre-internet kids a rare chance to giggle over pictures of nekkid people ), but anyway. I think Morris included a section in there about sports teams that wear red having increased chances of success.

Can anyone tell me what Morris said - and did he include any stats to back up his assertion?

Does the claim [still] stack up? Certainly is true in English football, Tiger Woods seems to have believed in it and Ferrari and McLaren (when they had red in the colours) seem to make it true for Formula 1 but it but doesn't, to my mind, work when looking at NFL champions. Does it hold any water for baseball? Any reliable sources on the matter since Morris published? --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 11:12, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
 * (Incidentally, with sources, Red could be much improved as a result of this discussion) --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 11:13, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
 * There's a few promising results in this Google Books search . --Viennese Waltz 11:30, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Cheating a bit - I used a reference in one of Viennese Waltz's google Books results - but here is: Influence of Red Jersey Color on Physical Parameters in Combat Sports (2013) by Dennis Dreiskaemper and Bernd Strauss, Institute of Sport and Exercise Sciences, University of Muenster. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Alansplodge (talk • contribs)
 * That looks pretty impressive. Any scientists able to verify it's a solid piece of work? --13:55, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Yes, because it is in a peer reviewed journal, it has undergone peer review. as a pet peeve, there is no job called "scientist" doing stuff called "science".  It is a large, disparate group of very different jobs that aren't interchangable.  -- Jayron 32 14:12, 9 February 2018 (UTC)


 * The most successful American sports team in history is the New York Yankees, and their main color is a dark navy blue. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:28, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
 * You're attempting a statistical untruth. Their main color is but one factor in their success. It's like saying the All Blacks are the rugby world champions solely because their outfits are black, yet the Tongan team doesn't do well because their jerseys are red, and ignoring the fact that Tonga is a tiny country with a small population to choose players from. Akld guy (talk) 19:14, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
 * The statement "sports teams that wear red have increased chances of success" is the statistically questionable assertion. It implies that red leads to success. But it might be that a larger percentage of teams wear red vs. other colors, so it's not unreasonable to suppose that there would be more successes in the long run than by teams wearing brown, for example. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:46, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
 * You're ignoring the peer-reviewed sources mentioned above which demonstrate exactly that teams that wear red have increased chances of success. --Viennese Waltz 22:59, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Bugs, what you're engaged in here is not data analysis, but cherry picking. The fact that the Yankees have won a lot of games means nothing.  The research does not say that only red teams are allowed to win any games, or that teams from other colors are all losing teams. It says that on the balance, teams that wear red win more games than they otherwise should if color was not a factor at all.  Carefully selecting a single non-red team is meaningless.-- Jayron 32 04:59, 10 February 2018 (UTC)
 * That's why the Cincinnati Reds have won so many World Series than the New York Yankees. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 05:00, 10 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Yes, I haven't read the sources but '"sports teams that wear red have increased chances of success" is the statistically questionable assertion. It implies that red leads to success. But it might be that a larger percentage of teams wear red vs. other colors' suggests BB doesn't understand basic concepts. When someone suggests there is a statistical correlation it generally implies that they have tried to account for differences in the number of one compared to the other. Of course poor quality science and statistics abound, however if it's actually published it normally means it isn't quite that bad. (Stuff in blogs, newspapers, etc may be different.) If you are going by secondary source descriptions of the published research, you do have to be careful that the research itself actually says what the source says it does, since misunderstanding and poor reporting abound, but that's also a distinct point. And as always, correlation does not imply causation, so just because someone has found a statistical correlation between wearing red and success does not imply that 'red leads to success'. Nil Einne (talk) 03:04, 13 February 2018 (UTC)
 * I'm reminded of this antique story, of a farmer that had white horses and black horses. He observed that the white horses ate more than the black horses, so he sold all the white horses. He failed to take into account that he had more white horses than black horses. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 04:31, 13 February 2018 (UTC)


 * See Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. All of the world's known languages have at least two color terms, "dark" and "light" the focal points for which are what in English are called black and white.  If a language only has three color terms, the third term will always have red as its focal point.  The term red is often synonymous with colored Sp. "colorado" or beautiful Rus. "krasny/krasnaya".  Red, white, and black color schemes are highly popular in marketing.  See the logos for everything from Coke and Budweiser to Verizon and KFC.  Verizon was simply a rebranding of Bell Atlantic when it ceased being a regional carrier.  The name change was chosen to be forward-looking, vee and zee were chosen as "futuristic" and the former blue/green scheme was intentionally replaced with the edgier red/white/black. μηδείς (talk) 19:36, 9 February 2018 (UTC)


 * There is no question that red is a very eye-catching color. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:43, 9 February 2018 (UTC)


 * Top World Series winners by total, team, and color(s):
 * 27 - NY Yankees - very dark blue
 * 11 - STL Cardinals - red
 * 9 - PHI/OAK Athletics - dark blue, then green and gold
 * 8 - NY/SF Giants - dark blue or black, then orange, then orange and black
 * 8 - BOS Red Sox - dark blue, then red
 * 6 - BKN/LA Dodgers - light blue
 * 5 - CIN Reds - red
 * 5 - PIT Pirates - black and gold
 * 4 - DET Tigers - orange
 * ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 15:37, 10 February 2018 (UTC)
 * One problem with that is that these teams all have white in one version of their uniforms at least, but white is not treated as a team color the way black is. In any case, the Eagles just won the Superbowl in Eagles blue. μηδείς (talk) 22:22, 10 February 2018 (UTC)
 * White is typically a "background" color for home uniforms, with gray or another color on the road. So we're basically talking "trim" here. And the team with the most NFL championships, the Green Bay Packers, originally wore blue, as I recall, and of course later switched to green and yellow. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 00:16, 11 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Grey is a colour to avoid in English football. In 1996, Manchester United wore their grey "away kit" (the team that's playing at their home ground chooses which colour to wear, so visiting teams need an alternative) for four matches without winning and in the fifth changed from grey to blue-and-white when they were behind at half-time.  Alansplodge (talk) 19:22, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
 * As others have already point out analysing a single championship of a single sport is unlikely to provide much evidence in supporting or disproving the notion. It's almost as bad as someone saying clearly there's no correlation between smoking and cancer because their grandfather smoked a 2 packs a day and lived to 105 when they got run over by a drunk driver, one of their greataunts smoked 1.5 packs a day and lived to 110 when they slipped on the Queen's congratulatory message for their birthday and hit their head, another of their greataunts was never smoked a day in their life and died of lung cancer at 25, and a greatuncle also never smoked and died of esophageal cancer at 31. Nil Einne (talk) 02:52, 13 February 2018 (UTC)