{"id":151,"date":"2011-10-25T06:58:48","date_gmt":"2011-10-25T10:58:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.rotovalue.com\/?p=151"},"modified":"2011-10-25T06:58:48","modified_gmt":"2011-10-25T10:58:48","slug":"winning-game-5-a-curse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.rotovalue.com\/index.php\/2011\/10\/25\/winning-game-5-a-curse\/","title":{"rendered":"Winning game 5 a curse?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I read an MLB.com story<\/a>\u00a0about the Rangers’ game 5 win, and it cited this statistic:<\/p>\n

The team that won Game 5 prevailed in 26 of the previous 39 World Series that were tied at 2 after four games.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This sounds like a good omen for Texas. But wait a minute. Suppose each team has a 50% chance to win any given game. Then we’d expect the game 5 winner to win the series 3\/4 of the time, not 2\/3. After all, the only way to lose a 7 game series is to lose twice in a row, a 25% chance.
\nHmmm… Now the chances of winning any given game aren’t 50%. Home teams tend to win more often than visiting teams. So I used the baseball-reference play-finder<\/a>\u00a0to search for postseason games won by home and away, and found the home team won 720 games, and lost 605, or a .543 winning percentage. So now if I assume the home team won game 5, then since they’ll be visiting in games 6 and 7, they’d have a 54.3% chance of losing any given game, and so a 29.5% chance of losing 2 in a row. Even with this pessimistic assumption, though, I’d expect the game 5 winner to win the series 70% of the time, not 67%.
\nIf it’s the visiting team wins game 5, the chances of them losing 2 home games in a row is just 21%. When I blend these, assuming the chance of a home team winning is always 54.3%, and thus 54.3% of game 5 winners are home teams, then I get the chance of the game 5 winner winning the series working out to 74.4%. So accounting for home\/road doesn’t really make a significant difference over simply assuming it’s a 50\/50 coin flip.
\nNow there have been only 39 previous World Series where the teams were tied at 2. That’s a tiny sample size, so I shouldn’t really be surprised that just 2 out of 3 of them won the series, when I’d expect it to be closer to 3 out of 4. But it is amusing, and also somewhat counter-intuitive, that so far game 5 winners have actually won the World Series less <\/strong>often than you’d expect by random chance alone!
\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I read an MLB.com story\u00a0about the Rangers’ game 5 win, and it cited this statistic: The team that won Game 5 prevailed in 26 of the previous 39 World Series that were tied at 2 after four games. This sounds like a good omen for Texas. But wait a minute. Suppose each team has a… Continue reading Winning game 5 a curse?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rotovalue.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rotovalue.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rotovalue.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rotovalue.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rotovalue.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rotovalue.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rotovalue.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rotovalue.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rotovalue.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}