#Bobby fink series

#Bobby fink series

At each of those increments, what I found was an essentially random relationship between the winning percentages in those fragments and the results of the Division Series - correlations ranging from -0.042 to 0.019, a whole lot of nothing. I first wrote about this in 2009, examining 112 playoff-bound teams from 1995 to 2008 and how each performed in their final seven, 14 and 21 regular season games as well as those from August 31 to the end of the season, which sometimes trickles into the first week of October (for the rest of this piece, I’ll refer to this as September records or September winning percentage despite the spillover). There’s no particular reason why these teams with shorter winning streaks than the first group would have more postseason success, but that’s the way it’s crumbled, cookie-wise.Ĭonsidering those two groups together touches upon a point I’ve made annually for over a decade, based on studies that I did while writing for Baseball Prospectus and then SI.com: there’s no correlation between a team’s performance in September and its subsequent performance in October. Seven of them won at least one postseason series, and five won the pennant, but only the 1970 Orioles, the middle child from a run of three consecutive pennant winners, brought home the World Series trophy they did so by beating the Reds in a five-game series. Here 11 of the 15 teams with late-season streaks of exactly 11 wins made the playoffs. Includes only streaks that began on August 1 or later, and counts only games through the end of that regular season. In fact, no team that’s run off a late-season streak - starting in August or September - of more than 11 wins has even reached the World Series during the division play era (1969 onward):

Yet they too were defeated in a five-game Division Series, losing to the Twins. The 2002 A’s won 20 straight games from August 13 to September 6 and finished with 103 wins, the franchise’s highest total since 1988. The story was similar for the team whose AL record they broke. Yet when the postseason rolled around, Cleveland was unceremoniously bounced, losing a tight five-game series to the Yankees. The team finished with 102 wins, the highest total by the franchise since 1954, and hopes were high that they could secure the title that they’d come so close to winning just the year before.

From August 24 to September 15 of the 2017 season, the defending AL champions steamrolled opponents, piling up wins in close games and in blowouts until they’d set an American League record. Look no further than that aforementioned Cleveland team for a harsh reminder of that lesson. For as unbeatable as the Cardinals appear right now, the history of late-season winning streaks tells us that while this run may certainly help the team secure a playoff berth, it doesn’t tell us anything about how they’ll fare in October.