The Importance of Winning Early

             
 
Near the beginning of the 1998 baseball season, Dom Zminda of Stats Inc.
wrote a column for his America On-Line column.  It dealt with the
importance of the first few games of the season and started with a table
correlating a team's mark in its first 10 games with its eventual
record.  For example, of the 218 teams to start the season 4-6 since
1951, only 38.1% of them managed to avoid a losing record, while 63.3%
of the 226 teams starting out 6-4 finished up at .500 or better.  He
continued:
 
> Interesting stuff, but John Dewan wanted Jim to go out an even more of a
> limb. He asked to see the same chart based on a club's first two or three
> games. This one simply knocked me over:
>
>   Teams W-L Record in First 2 or 3 Games 1951-97
>                    Cumul Finish     Ended Season
>           # of    ==============    ============
>    Start   Tms     Record     Pct    .500+   Pct
>     0- 2   284  21279-23213  .478     119   41.9%
>     1- 1   494  38916-39137  .499     251   50.8%
>     2- 0   288  23648-21493  .524     189   65.6%
>
>     0- 3   146  10936-11925  .478      56   38.4%
>     1- 2   383  29470-30800  .489     182   47.5%
>     2- 1   388  30937-30317  .505     213   54.9%
>     3- 0   149  12500-10801  .536     108   72.5%
>
> Would you have guessed that there'd be such a big difference between
> starting  out 0-2 versus going 1-1 or 2-0? But there it is, and it seems
> to be anything but a fluke. At every number of games we
> looked at from two to 10, there's the same straight-line progression.
 
Which led him to conclude:
 
> early-season games ARE a lot more important than you might think.
> That old baseball adage - "A win in April is worth two in September" - is
> not so crazy.
 
I thought it was very interesting, but decided to see if the phenomenon
was unique to games at the start of the season.  So here's what I did:
rather than concentrate on the first 3 games of the season, I looked at
ALL 3-game stretches during the season.  If a win in April is really
worth 2 at other times, you'd expect the spread of winning percentages
to be more pronounced in games 1-3 than, for example, in games 135-7.
But it isn't.
 
  Teams W-L Record in Games 135-137 1951-96
                   Cumul Finish     Ended Season
          # of    ==============    ============
   Record  Tms     Record     Pct    .500+   Pct
    0- 3   143  10556-12246  .463      48   33.6%
    1- 2   344  26666-28265  .485     145   42.2%
    2- 1   354  28918-27679  .511     214   60.5%
    3- 0   143  12450-10400  .545     114   79.7%
 
* I've removed ties from the equation.  I guess I should call them
decisions not games, but you get the idea.
 
The median percentages of these 4 groups of records, starting with the
games 1-3 and going through to games 160-162, is the following:
 
   Record  Win Pct    .500+ Pct
    0- 3    .469        35.8%
    1- 2    .490        46.8%
    2- 1    .511        58.7%
    3- 0    .530        70.0%
 
So what their study shows is not that early games are more significant
than later ones, but that a lot more bad teams go 0-3, at ANY time
during the season, than do good teams.  And so on.
 
By the way, the worst single game to lose if you want to have a winning
season?  Game 81.  Only 43.4% of the teams losing their 81st decision
since 1951 were able to avoid a losing season.  The best game to lose?
It's a tie: all 5 teams that dropped their 163rd, 164th or 165th
decision of the season had great records.  I wonder why.

I'd like to thank Scott Flatow for bringing Dom Zminda's column to my attention.

Tom Ruane

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