Thursday, July 23, 2009
Most Recent 10-game losing streaks for all 30 teams
Posted by Chris JaffeYesterday I wrote a piece on the most recent 10-game winning streaks for all teams. Inspired by a comment made by a poster at BTF (as the site had a thread on my THT Live thing yesterday) here's the sequel: the most recent losing streaks for all squads. It's organized the same as yesterday's piece: the date listed below is when the 10th straight game was lost (which is also how they're organized) and in parathesis is how many games were lost in that streak.
Three teams haven't lost this many in a row in over 25 years - before looking, any guesses who they are?
Here they are, bunched into fives to make it easier to look over the list:
BAL 9/26/08 (10)
SEA 9/20/08 (12)
PIT 8/31/08 (10)
WAS 8/17/08 (12)
OAK 8/7/08 (10)
CLE 7/9/08 (10)
KCR 5/28/08 (12)
TBR 7/4/07 (11)
HOU 5/30/07 (10)
MIL 9/3/06 (10)
ATL 6/22/06 (10)
COL 5/7/05 (10)
NYM 9/7/04 (11)
ARI 7/21/04 (14)
DET 8/22/03 (11)
PHI 9/13/99 (11)
ANA 7/25/99 (11)
FLO 6/25/99 (10)
MIN 9/19/98 (10)
CIN 6/23/98 (11)
CHC 4/13/97 (14)
SFG 6/30/96 (10)
TEX 7/26/95 (10)
TOR 6/28/94 (10)
BOX 6/18/94 (11)
SDP 5/18/94 (13)
LAD 6/21/92 (10)
STL 5/25/80 (10)
CWS 6/20/76 (10)
NYY 6/3/13 (13)
No, that's not a typo at the end. The Yanks haven't had a ten-game losing streak in 95 years. Great googily moogily. I checked and was disappointed to find no ten-game losing streaks in the Federal League, otherwise the question up top of this piece would've been: how many franchises do you suppose have had a 10-game losing streak since the Yanks last did so? -- If the answer was 31, Lord knows no one would get that one right.
The White Sox also have the second-longest stretch without a 10-game winning streak. In fact, both their 10-game winning and losing streaks happened in 1976.
The Cards have had a trio of legendary managers helm their club over the last three decades: Whitey Herzog, Joe Torre, and Tony LaRussa. None lost ten in a row with the club.
I'm amazed no club has lost ten in a row yet in '09. Then again, they made up for that with five achieving the feat in the last two months of 2008.
History instructor by day, statnerd by night, Chris Jaffe leads one of the most exciting double lives imaginable; with the exception of every other double life possible to imagine. Despite his lack of comic-book-hero-worthiness, Chris enjoys farting around with this stuff. His new book, Evaluating Baseball's Managers is available for order. Chris welcomes responses to his articles via e-mail. Oh, and now he's on twitter.
The Royals will attempt to be the first team to lose 10 in a row on Friday. They’re sending Greinke to the mound against the Rangers. Now if the Royals were a normal team, with Greinke on the bump, you would really like their chances to stop this streak. However, the Royals are far from normal.
The Royals have won only 10 of Greinke’s 19 starts. Ten! The Royals have one of the best pitchers in the universe and can barely win half his starts. Then, factor in a bullpen that has coughed up leads in the eighth inning of four of the last six games.
I give the Royals a 75% chance of losing #10 on Friday.