Any Dallas Mavericks fans who groaned when the execrable Golden State Warriors knocked their team out of the NBA playoffs this spring, or New York Yankees diehards still shaking their heads that their 97-65 (regular season) team watched as the 83-78 St. Louis Cardinals went home with World Series rings last year, take heart: two physicists have devised a way to make 99 percent sure that the “best” team really does win.

Sure, upsets spice up the game. But let’s get real: the 91-71 Florida Marlins as the 2003 world champions and not, say, the 101-61 Atlanta Braves or Yankees? Over the last 100 years, find Eli Ben-Naim and Nicolas Hengartner of Los Alamos National Laboratory, the lower-ranked baseball team “had an astounding 44% chance of defeating” a higher-ranked team. Fans know that this reflects the fact that even a worse team can have a terrific pitcher, and a better team can suddenly find itself putting on the mound someone who just flew in from the minor leagues to fill a gap in the rotation, or that a few bad bounces can determine a game, among other quirks that make the sport exciting. The result, of course, is that “even after a long series of competitions, the best team does not always finish first,” the scientists write in an upcoming paper in the journal Physical Review E.