By Harron Lee, Johnny Perkins, Callan Fang, Simon Karpinski, Beckett Yi, Ryan Mooney, Jaedon Ballou
For baseball fans, October always feels larger than life. The postseason arrives, confidence takes over, predictions fly around, and everyone thinks they can see the ending before the first pitch. So before Game 1 of the 2025 World Series between the Dodgers and Blue Jays, we asked a fun but serious question. Can everyday intuition, even among analytically trained fans, beat the odds of Vegas?
To find out, we surveyed 97 people around Harvard Square, including undergraduates, HSAC members, faculty, and locals. Each participant completed an interview about predictions, confidence, emotional preferences, and reactions to betting odds. What we found revealed how people think about baseball when the stakes feel high.
Below are the seven biggest behavioral stories that emerged during the seven-game series.
1. Confidence Without Accuracy: The Calibration Problem
The first result was impossible to miss. Everyone was too confident. Across all groups, average confidence sat in the mid-60s, while actual accuracy never broke 33%.
Most respondents predicted a Dodgers win in Game 1, but the Blue Jays dominated and caught nearly everyone off guard. To measure the mismatch between predictions and outcomes, we used the Brier Score, which compares a stated probability to the true result. Lower scores indicate better calibration. Higher scores indicate misplaced confidence.
The surprise was where the best and worst calibration came from. The group with the strongest analytics background scored the worst. Tourists and locals performed the best. Confidence rose with self-reported baseball knowledge, but accuracy did not. Across the board, belief in one’s predictive skill consistently outpaced truth.
2. Anchoring: Who Actually Listens to Vegas
Once we showed participants the FanDuel line giving the Dodgers a 61.1% chance to win Game 1, the crowd split instantly. The difference was not fandom or age, but rather knowledge.
The visual makes the pattern clear. People in the low-knowledge tier updated at the highest rate (27.7%), medium-knowledge respondents updated less (16.7%), and high-knowledge respondents rarely updated (7.7%). This matched what we saw throughout the survey. People who felt uncertain were the most open to expert information. People confident in their baseball expertise were the least willing to move, even when professionals provided the odds.
- “Yes, I would update,” respondents averaged 37.95% confidence
- “No” respondents had an average confidence of 60%
- All seven respondents who claimed 100% confidence refused to update their responses
We also found that those who updated were 16.3 percentage points more accurate on Game 1, even with a small sample. Humility helped. Certainty hurt. Vegas rewarded those who were willing to listen.
3. The Game 1 Myth: Momentum Bias Meets Wishful Thinking
We asked participants a simple question. Would the winner of Game 1 go on to win the World Series? More than half (54.6%) said yes. Then the Blue Jays won Game 1, and the Dodgers went on to win the series, proving the belief wrong immediately.
This idea was prevalent among lower-knowledge fans and among Blue Jays supporters. 42.6% of lower-knowledge respondents believed it. Among Blue Jays fans, the number climbed to 65.2%, making them 1.4× more likely than Dodgers fans to think Game 1 decided everything.
Momentum is an easy story to believe, especially when you want the underdog to pull off something big. But the actual series showed how quickly that story can fall apart.
4. Fandom vs Rationality: When the Heart Makes the Pick
Team loyalty shaped predictions in powerful ways. Dodgers fans chose their own team 94.1% of the time. Blue Jays fans chose theirs 43.5% of the time.
Confidence deepened the divide. Dodgers fans who picked against their team had almost no confidence. Blue Jays fans who decided against their team became more confident. Emotion shaped both the choice and the strength of people’s beliefs.
Motivations told the same story. Among people who picked the Blue Jays, 87% also wanted them to win. Among those who chose the Dodgers, only 64.9% wanted the Dodgers to win. Underdog picks were often driven by desire, rather than probability.
5. Contradiction and Framing: When Beliefs Don’t Line Up
Some respondents gave answers that did not match. They picked the Blue Jays to win Game 1, but also said they would be more surprised if the Blue Jays won. Their prediction reflected hope. Their surprise rating revealed what they actually believed. These contradictions also showed up in confidence. Respondents whose answers did not align were noticeably less confident. Contradictors averaged 56.1% confidence, compared to 67.8% for non-contradictors and an overall average of 66%. The visual captures this gap clearly.
This confidence difference suggests that contradictions were not random mistakes. They signaled an underlying tension. People who made emotional predictions but intellectually doubted them expressed that uncertainty through their confidence even before being asked about surprise.
Framing sharpened the picture. We asked: “What would surprise you more: Blue Jays winning or Dodgers losing?” The overall split was almost perfect. Half chose one. Half chose the other.
Once we broke responses down by group, the split became even more revealing. Undergraduates were nearly even, with 45.8% choosing “Dodgers losing.” Faculty showed an almost identical balance at 44.4%. Locals leaned more toward the favorite’s failure, with 55.6% choosing “Dodgers losing.” HSAC members stood out most clearly. A striking 69.2% said “Dodgers losing” would be more surprising, the strongest preference among all groups. This pattern suggests that fans with greater baseball familiarity were more likely to interpret the same event as the favorite underperforming rather than the underdog overachieving.
These framing patterns demonstrate how less knowledgeable fans tend to focus on the underdog’s achievement, while more knowledgeable fans focus on the favorite’s failure. The event did not change, but the mental reference point did. The contrast became sharpest when predictions were compared to surprise ratings. Many confident Blue Jays predictors still admitted that a Blue Jays win would surprise them.
6. Event Optimism: Home Runs, Walk-Offs, and Highlight Bias
When respondents imagined how the game might unfold, they tended to focus on highlight moments.
Home Runs
Participants predicted a home run 37% of the time, even though the true likelihood was closer to 45%. Home runs feel rare and special, even though they happen often. Excitement outweighed frequency.
Walk Offs
Optimism grew even stronger for walk-offs. Respondents predicted a 37.1% chance of a walk-off in Game 1 despite the real probability being around 15%. When asked about the full series, 82.5% predicted at least one walk-off.
Knowledge gaps played a role. Many respondents, including several faculty and undergraduates, were not fully sure what a walk-off was. Less experienced fans leaned toward predicting home runs, while more knowledgeable fans gravitated toward the dramatic appeal of a walk-off.
Fandom and Drama
A complementary chart revealed another layer. Blue Jays fans leaned toward predicting a walk-off, while Dodgers fans favored a home run. Walk-offs signal late-game chaos. Home runs feel like pure firepower. The split highlights how differently fans imagine drama.
7. What Knowledge Really Measures: The Role of Recall
We also included an objective measure of baseball knowledge to complement the self-reported scores. Participants were asked to name as many baseball players as they could. Their answers were scored using the same ten-point knowledge scale used in the survey, which combined familiarity with teams, rules, analytics concepts, and player recognition. Naming active MLB players counted strongly toward this scale because it demonstrated current awareness rather than general cultural familiarity. For example, Babe Ruth was by far the most frequently named player, yet he was often mentioned by respondents who demonstrated limited engagement with modern baseball.
The differences between groups were clear. Respondents who named active players averaged 6.0 on the knowledge scale. Those who named only historical or fictional players averaged 2.2. Those who named no one averaged 1.5. The “name a player” task thus functioned as a quick reality check on the self-reported scores and proved to be one of the strongest predictors of actual baseball understanding.
These differences mapped directly onto prediction behavior. People who struggled to name players were more likely to update based on the Vegas line and showed less homer bias. Their predictions were more flexible because their priors were weaker. In contrast, respondents who named several active players often wanted the Blue Jays to win, yet still predicted the Dodgers. Knowledge created a stronger identity with the underdog but also a stronger realism about what was likely to happen.
Conclusion
Across every part of our study, one pattern dominated. Emotion beat probability. Respondents picked the wrong Game 1 winner with high confidence, imagined unlikely dramatic moments, leaned on momentum myths, and let fandom shape what felt surprising. Gut instinct often spoke louder than data.
There were bright spots. People who updated after seeing the odds performed better. Knowledgeable fans understood that a Blue Jays win would not have been shocking. Even contradictory respondents revealed clearer expectations when asked what would surprise them.
The overall picture was clear. The public got the series winner right but missed Game 1, and confidence rarely aligned with accuracy. Fandom blurred judgment. Framing shifted perception. Many ignored the Vegas line entirely.
So did Harvard beat Vegas? No. But the point was never just to win a prediction contest. The real value was understanding how people think when the moment feels big. Baseball predictions sit at the crossroads of logic and emotion, where stories compete with statistics and confidence often outrun reality.
Learning that might be worth more than getting a single game right.
