Burnt Orange Report

Nolan Ryan, Barry Bonds, the 2000 Mariners, Joe Dimaggio, Ted Williams, and Cal Ripken all have a pretty good claim on the greatest feat in baseball history.

A four game sweep against a tapped bullpen and occasionally shoddy starters doesn't come close. Its wonderful and all, but lets keep perspective here.

And wait... shouldn't you be rooting for the Astros???????

In history no team has ever come back from an 0-3 deficit in a seven-game series. It is the greatest feat in baseball history, by virtue of having never happened in championship play.

Did you look at those scores in the first three games? It looked like the Yanks were hitting off of a tee. Tapped bullpen? Another excuse to be dismissive. A team that was utterly dominated won three close games and then committed a blowout on the toughest road turf in sports.

All of these others are either tributes to seasonal or career consistency, except the Mariners, who last I checked, didn't close the deal in 2000. And they sure didn't rally from 0-3.

Now, I'll concede that this is maybe not the very rarest feat, but it is up there, so don't diminish it. Assuming evenly-matched teams, the probabilty of sweeping four straight games is .0625 . . . the probability of doing it after losing the first three games is .0078125. You can expect to see this happen about once in every 128 seven-game series. There have been about that many seven-game series played in the playoffs and World Series since the inception of post-league play in 1903 (137 best of seven series), so we were overdue for this outcome.

But it is definitely more rare than anything the Mariners accomplished. After all, losing the playoffs is pretty common. In a given year, seven of eight teams do it (p = .875).

:)

My fiance made a deal with God. If the Yankees lose then he has to let Kerry win the election. As a Yankees fan I wasn't so sure I would make that deal. Then after waking up this morning and realizing that the world was still spinning I was glad she made that deal. Let's just hope she picked the right religion :).