So it’s only September. So quite a few teams are still in the hunt for division titles. So no one’s even clinched as of this writing? Live Sports Direct can still tell you who’s going to win the World Series: The hotter team after September 1 (or, slightly more accurately, the team that improves most upon its April-to-August record).
Seriously, someone out there must have already crunched these numbers, what with at least one wild-card team in the World Series seemingly obligatory since the introduction of the expanded playoff format in Major League Baseball. If you’ve never seen the stats bent this way before, you’re welcome.
Take a look at the winning and losing teams from the past eight World Series. The numbers in parentheses represent the team’s regular-season record from September 1 onward, the team’s overall regular-season record, and the differential between the two in percent points, respectively.
2001 – Arizona Diamondbacks (.519, .568, minus-49) over New York Yankees (.457, .594, minus-137)
2002 – Anaheim Angels (.667, .611, plus-56) over San Francisco Giants (.692, .590, plus-102)
2003 – Florida (.692, .562, plus-130) over Yankees (.667, .623, plus-44)
2004 – Boston Red Sox (.656, .605, plus-51) over St. Louis Cardinals (.580, .648, minus-68)
2005 – Chicago White Sox (.613, .611, plus-2) over Houston Astros (.633, .549, plus-84)
2006 – Cardinals (.414, .516, minus-102) over Detroit Tigers (.429, .586, minus-157)
2007 – Red Sox (.593, .593, plus-0) over Colorado Rockies (.724, .552, plus-172)
2008 – Philadelphia Phillies (.680, .568, plus-112) over Tampa Bay Rays (.481, .599, minus-118)
The astute will immediately notice that the hotter-team theory fails twice in this timespan. While a 75% success rate are pretty good odds to take to the sportsbook – particularly if you happen upon a decent-sized underdog (see 2003 Marlins or 2006 Cardinals) – these two instances can be regarded as fairly large anomalies.
In 2002, the Angels became only the fifth expansion team ever to win the World Series in its first appearance, chasing the fourth: the Arizona Diamondbacks. (The others are the 1969 Miracle Mets, the 1992 Toronto Blue Jays, and the 1997 Florida Marlins.) Happily, only three franchises have yet to appear in the ‘Series: the Texas Rangers, Seattle Mariners and Washington Nationals. (Incidentally, Texas started September with a four-game winning streak and theoretically remain in the hunt for the wild-card spot at 2.5 back of the Red Sox with 26 to play.)
As for those 2007 Colorado Rockies, well … there are just times in baseball when you have to ignore the tendencies. Interestingly enough, by disproving the hot-team-wins-the-Series theory, those Rockies also demonstrate the importance in this decade of heating up in the 2000s. Going into September, Colorado was a sub-.500 team, and the subsequent .724 winning percentage is the highest recorded by a playoff team in September in this decade. The Rocks’ incredible September was made possible by the lightning-in-a-bottle 14-1 run to close out the season; this would become a 21-1 run after the National League playoffs, comparable in National League history only to the 1936 New York Giants, who went 20-1 at one point.
As Colorado fans (including yours truly) well recall, the Rockies then met with another historically unprecedented event, this one not of their own making: An eight-day layoff between the National League championship series and the World Series. You can’t statistically quantify “riding the wave” (yet), but the lesson is clear: Never bet on a team after an enforced vacation of more than a week.
So there you have it: The most key of key stats. Just look out for those Rangers.