Archive for the 'Postseason' Category

World Series Game #7s - Baseball-Reference.com.

Complete list of World Series Game #7's.  Where do you expect tonight's game to rate?

The Rangers 3-2 victory over the Tigers last night was the third consecutive game which they won by a single run. Here are the teams that have won at least 3 consecutive one-run games in the post season. Read the rest of this entry »

The postseason is off to an exciting start with 3 series reaching a dramatic sudden death game five.  Here are the years with the most sudden death League Division Series games:

The baseball postseason is a time for excitement and histrionics.  A time when players are considered to be in massive slumps with just  a few bad games, but  it is also when players are given glorious labels for life based on one game or even one at bat.  However, the expansion of the playoffs combined with the uneven salary structure of major League Baseball,  has provided us with an interesting  new entity, the large post-season sample size.

Consider the following 2 extremely similar players:

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As the Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs kick off a 3-game interleague series tonight at Fenway Park, I am reminded of just how close we came in 2003 to what would have been a dream World Series. Two historic clubs, a pair of infamous curses, nearly 200 years of combined futility... how could this not have been one of the greatest Fall Classics ever?

It could very easily have happened, if not for two blunders -- Steve Bartman interfering with Moises Alou's play on a foul ball in Game 6 of the NLCS, and Grady Little leaving Pedro Martinez on the mound for the 8th inning in Game 7 of the ALCS. The Red Sox had a 91% chance of advancing to the World Series in the middle of the 8th, leading 5-2 with 6 outs remaining. And at the time of the Bartman incident, the Cubs had a 92% chance of closing out the Marlins and going to their first Series since 1945. By all rights, the WS matchup for the ages should have happened.

And what if it had? Who would have won a hypothetical 2003 Cubs-Red Sox World Series? Vote below:

Reader Kahuna Tuna brought this to my attention. There have been just 16 times that a player entered a post-season game as a pinch-hitter and hit a triple:

Brendan Harris entered his game as a pinch-hitter in the 6th and indeed tripled immediately, driving in the first run of the game. This was the game that later featured a 2-run HR by A-Rod in the bottom of the 9th and a walk-off homer by Mark Teixeira in the 11th.

Lenny Dykstra also tripled in his first PA, coming in the top of the 9th of his game. The Mets rallied for 3 runs that inning, sending the game to extra innings. Many of you will remember this epic playoff game that went 16 innings in the end.

Notice that as rare an event as a post-season pinch-hit triple is, it still happened twice in the same game when speedsters Tom Goodwin and Doug Glanville both did it for the Cubs in 2003 against the Marlins. That was Game 3 of the NLCS, a few games before Steve Bartman became famous.

Of the 6 pinch-hit triples to come in the World Series, Aaron Rowand's this year was the first time it actually helped the team win the game. All of the previous ones came in losses.

Thanks to reader Kahuna Tuna for emailing me the post idea and most of the analysis too.

In 1979  the Pittsburgh Pirates  defeated the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series.  It wasn't easy. Not only did the Pirates have the Herculean task of   coming back from a three games to one disadvantage, they had to do so  with the last  two games on the road. The Pirates persevered,  and in the 30 years since,  no road team has won game 7 of the World Series. There have been 8 World Series game 7s since the Pirates victory, but each time it has been the home team that walked away with the hardware.

The entirety of my baseball fandom spans those thirty years and that fact combined with a constant media barrage about the difficulty of winning game 7 on the road has led me to accept that game 7 at home is a significant advantage. However, it wasn't always so. In fact, after the Pirates successful comeback vs. the Orioles, road teams held a  17-10 advantage in sudden death World-Series games. It wasn't until 2002, the last World Series game 7, that the home teams retook the overall historical edge.

Here are the results of all the sudden death World Series Games.  The home teams are in red:

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As you probably know, the 2010 Giants won the World Series after leading the majors in Earned Run Average during the regular season. So here's a recent question from B-R reader Joshua Rosenstock:

"How many times has the team that led the MLB in ERA won the World Series?"

Let's go to the data...
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It's rare that you see anyone in the mainstream media acknowledge the role of chance in the playoffs, so I was surprised to see this John Shea article on the Giants' good luck in the San Francisco Chronicle.

It's not like Shea directly addressed the .251 BABIP allowed by San Francisco pitchers during the playoffs or anything, but a major newspaper writer -- in the winning team's city, no less -- hinting at the randomness inherent in a 15-game sample is at least a start.

Just for kicks, I thought it might be interesting to chart the World Series to get a sense of who won and how. To do this I simply used the PI to find all the "Last" WS games each season won by the AL, and all the "Last" WS games won each season by the NL and combined them using Excel. Here is the result. The number refers to the number of games in the WS. Positive numbers mean that the AL won, while negative numbers mean the NL won.