Editor’s Note: This is a column and does not reflect the views or opinions of the Daily Barometer.

An 11-1 record with me in attendance sounds lucky for the Corvallis Knights, doesn’t it?

Well, the Superstitious Statistician takes little at face value, so further investigation is required. 

I have kept track of the Knights’ record with me in attendance since my first game. The Knights are 26-10 without me at home games since June 22, 2024, and the 11-1 record can be verified here in my articles at The Baro.

To provide some background for the uninitiated, I have been using the Superstitious Statistician moniker for a while now, but I published my first article under that name for The Baro in August of 2024. That summer, the Knights were 6-1 with me in attendance, their only loss being a playoff exit at the hands of the Portland Pickles.

That actually ended a reign of seven consecutive titles for the Knights, so 6-1 looks like ironic good luck given that my presence ended their title run. Upon further review, this becomes a paradox… and perhaps that solves this.

But actually, it doesn’t. Here’s why.

In this beautiful summer 2025 season, the Knights were 5-0 with me in attendance.

No loss, luck restored, right?

Try again, the paradox deepens.

This year the Knights won a playoff game with me in the stands. This leaves the Superstitious Statistician 1-1 in playoff games and 9-0 elsewhere. But the paradox is that they then lost on the road, where I was not. Hold on, the paradox isn’t over yet.

Had they won that game, they would have come back to Corvallis, either to ironically and paradoxically finish with a perfect 6-0 with me, or the same 5-1 record as the year before.

But, that didn’t happen, so it’s a superstitious theoretical, which I am not sure whether it is good luck or bad luck to conjecture about.

…Moving on.

Our paradox continues through the lens of retrospection. When we consider that by observing my ‘luckiness’ effect at games I brought forth some kind of metaphysical cataclysm where the mere observation of luck doomed the whole system.

This is the superposition of the Superstitious Statistician. It is not that one truth cancels the other, but that both exist together. The record tells one story, the titles another, and neither can be denied. To call myself lucky is correct, but incomplete. To call myself unlucky is also correct, but incomplete. Only in holding both together does the picture clarify.

But, as per being the Superstitious Statistician, I will let test statistics decide this. After I ran a two-proportion z-test comparing the Knights’ winning percentage in games I attended versus those I didn’t.

The p-value was 0.083. Statistically speaking, we fail to reject the null hypothesis that my presence makes a difference at Knights games. 

Superstitiously, we look at the 11-1 record and say, ‘I totally do.’ It would be unlucky to believe otherwise.