Luck In Baseball

There are different ways of looking at luck in baseball. In the most common sense of the word, luck is undefinable. It’s whether that slicing line drive hooks to one side of the foul pole or the other; whether the batter hits that hanging slider over the center field fence or just misses it and pops it up for an easy out; whether the humidity and breeze that day make the knuckleball dive and shoot like a wiffle ball or drift lazily over the plate like a beach ball. Luck, in this sense, is unpredictable and ineffable. It’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Luck, in the statistical sense, is both more and less. There are times when a team wins a lot of one-run games and loses a lot of blowouts. A team like that seems to be getting by on luck, getting just enough offense to win in some tight spots, then completely flopping in others. The sort of disparity between run-differential and win-loss record led statisticians to create the concept of the Pythagorean win-loss record.

A team’s Pythagorean record (explained more fully here) measures the runs a team scores and the runs it surrenders and gives a rough tally of how many wins and losses the team should have expected to earn based on those figures. The difference between that total and the actual record is Pythagorean luck. The numbers fluctuate from year to year, but some team often will approach +10 or -10 in luck; that is to say, some team will win or lose 10 games the numbers say they shouldn’t have. This season, the Texas Rangers are currently baseball’s luckiest team, with a +nine margin, and the Los Angeles Angels are the unluckiest with -six. [Through Aug. 8]

Unlucky Losers

That’s hard luck for the Angels. But in the annals of baseball history, -six is not that bad. Baseball’s unluckiest team was more than twice as cursed by the baseball gods. As unlucky as the 2016 Mets have been with their recent epidemic of injuries, the 1993 Mets were even more star-crossed, by Pythagorean standards, racking up the all-time record in bad luck, -14.

At first glance, the Mets had good reason to be optimistic in 1993. After a mediocre 72-90 season in 1992, they started the 1993 season with a respectable lineup and one of the highest payrolls in baseball. Future Hall of Famer Eddie Murray was 37 years old but still capable of producing hits. Third baseman Howard Johnson was expecting to rebound from an injury-plagued season and hoping to return to the form that led the league in home runs in 1991. Vince Coleman and Bobby Bonilla made up two-thirds of an offensively potent outfield, and the pitching rotation included Doc Gooden, Bret Saberhagen, and Sid Fernandez. With the expansion Florida Marlins joining the National League East that year, Mets fans had good reason to believe they would avoid the cellar.

It was not to be. After sweeping a two-game series against Colorado, the other expansion team that year, the Mets were swept in turn by the Astros, losing the final game by one run. One-run losses are a theme with teams with bad Pythagorean luck, and the Mets were no exception. They would win 19 such games that year while losing 35. It wasn’t the worst record in one-run games—that would be the Boston Braves’ 7-31 record in their historically bad 1935 season—but it’s pretty bad, and the mark was the worst in the majors in 1993.

The Mets closed out April with a seven-game losing streak, with three of the seven being one-run losses. Even beyond Pythagorean stats, part of what makes a team feel unlucky is this sort of narrow loss, where the fan is left with the impression that if not for one of a hundred little things, the game might have been won. That feeling is never more pronounced than in the case of a walk-off loss. The Mets suffered their first of the year during that seven-game losing streak, when a Matt Williams single in the ninth inning lifted the Giants to victory. They would suffer ten walk-off losses that year in total against five walk-off wins.

That’s not the most walk-off losses ever–not even the most in Mets history–but remember, we’re not talking about the worst season ever, just the most unlucky. The 1962 Mets were expected to be terrible, and they were, finishing 40-120. The 1993 Mets, in contrast, performed, in the aggregate, like a halfway decent team; not playoff-bound, to be sure, but at least mediocre. Scoring 672 runs while giving up 744, they might be expected to hover a bit below .500, and their Pythagorean win-loss record reflects this, standing at 73-89. Their real win-loss record of 59-103 stands as a testament to how, in some seasons, all those little bounces and rolls go against you.

Unlucky Winners

There are other ways of being unlucky that do not involve losing, and the 1993 season holds an example of this, as well, in the case of the San Francisco Giants. The 1993 season was the last in which each league had only two divisions. While the Mets were languishing in an NL East led by the worst-to-first Philadelphia Phillies, the red-hot Giants were fighting for dominance of an NL West division that also included the Atlanta Braves.

The Giants started hot and stayed hot on the strength of a lineup that included Barry Bonds, Williams, Will Clark and Robby Thompson. They spent the first month of the season in or near first place, staying in the lead consistently for months after mid-May. By July 22, the Giants had built up a 10-game lead. As summer turned to fall, though, that lead slowly melted away as Atlanta climbed in the standings. The Braves, at the beginning of their decade-and-a-half tenure at the top of baseball, inexorably gained on the Giants, cutting their lead to five games over the next month and pulling into a tie for first on Sept. 10.

The last few weeks of the season saw the Giants fall to four games back before rekindling their winning ways and getting back to a tie for first in the last week of the season. With one game left to play, the Giants and Braves stood at the top of the division with identical records of 103-58. Had either team played in the NL East, it would have been in first by six games, but in the NL West they went down to a photo finish.

It’s hard to think of a team with 103 wins as unlucky—unless another team in its division has 104. That was the case for the 1993 Giants when Tom Glavine pitched the Braves to a win on the season’s last day, while seven Giants pitchers gave up twelve runs to the Dodgers, closing the year in a crushing loss. At 103-59, the Giants earned the dubious distinction of being the winningest team since the start of divisional play not to make the postseason.

End of an Era

With 103 wins, a truly optimistic wait-til-next-year attitude among Giants fans was not unreasonable. The 1994 season would see most of the 1993 Giants still on the team, and the still-dominant Braves moved to the NL East under the new three-division alignment. The new division structure also included a Wild Card playoff slot, which the Giants would have claimed easily had it existed the year before. Surely, San Francisco’s luck would change in 1994.

Of course, it was not to be. The Giants started hot but failed to sustain their success, falling into second place in mid-May and into third by June. But from a low point of 9½ games out, they climbed back to within a half game of first in late July on the strength of Williams’s major league-leading home run total. Then baseball went on strike, and the rug was pulled out from under the Giants again.

All of baseball could be fairly said to have been unlucky in 1994, but the Giants suffered a more particular harm. With Williams on pace for 62 home runs and Bonds not far behind him with a 54-home-run pace, Giants fans looked forward to a season unlike any since the 1961 Yankees saw Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris compete to chase Babe Ruth’s record. That chance vanished with the cancellation of the season.

For all of its statistical weirdness, the 1993 season stands out even more as the last year of a bygone era. With two divisions, no Wild Card, a 100-plus-win team missing the playoffs, and a home run record stuck stubbornly at 61, that season feels like a different era than the one that would emerge when players at last returned to the field in 1995. Juiced balls and juiced muscles left Maris’s home run record to gather dust in the record books, and the expanded playoffs nearly eliminated the chance for a 100-win team to miss the playoffs. The Giants and Mets both fell below .500 that year, neither especially lucky nor unlucky, just bad.

Changes in the game since 1993 seem to have been aimed at eliminating luck and randomness. Instant replay gives umpires another take on their split-second calls. Expanded playoffs help to ensure fewer winning teams are left out of the chance for a title. In some ways, the difference between which teams win and which are truly good has been narrowed. But, as this year’s Rangers and Angels could tell us, luck still has a role to play in the national pastime.