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. And 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.