Hey, I met a woman from Tokyo!
1985
(1 votes, average: 6.00 out of 10)
Loading... Two years ago May 10th my wife of nearly 24 years passed away after a nasty illness. We had two children of college age living away from home, which meant that I was entering my 50’s flying solo, picking up the pieces of a life that was once a partnership. How does one do that? There’s no survivor’s manual: do A, next is B, then follow up with C and Presto! you now have a life with new routines and go from there. Unsurprisingly it’s not quite that easy. While thinking about that, this Rumi quote has been sticking in my mind lately:
“Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.”
Byron Buxton is now over .300. Excellent pitching by D. J. Baxendale and Tyler Jay.
Doubles by Byron Buxton and Jorge Polanco and a home run by Adam Brett Walker II helped the Twins take a 3-0 lead after two. The Chiefs closed to 3-2 in the fourth, but Buxton and James Beresford each had an RBI double in the seventh and the Red Wings were not threatened again. Pat Dean went six innings and gave up nine hits and a walk, but only two runs. He struck out three. Buxton was 2-for-4 with a walk in addition to the two doubles, raising his average to .302. Polanco was 1-for-4 and is now hitting .310. Walker II was 2-for-3 and the home run was his fourth of the season.
The BayBears scored in the first inning and six pitchers took it from there to shut out the Lookouts. D. J. Baxendale took a complete game loss, giving up four hits and a walk with five strikeouts. He's now 1-4 with a 2.92 ERA, so he clearly doesn't know how to win. Chattanooga had eight hits, but they were all singles and two players had five of them, as Leonardo Reginatto was 3-for-3 and D. J. Hicks was 2-for-4. Daniel Palka was 0-for-4 to drop his average to .311.
Tyler Jay struck out seven in 6.1 innings, allowing five hits and two walks. The Miracle did not have a run-scoring hit, as two of the runs scored on sacrifice flies and the third by a hit batsman with the bases loaded. Edgar Corcino stayed hot, going 3-for-4. In his last three games, he is 7-for-12 with two home runs. Nick Gordon was given the day off.
Luis Arraez had a two-run double in the second, the Kernels scored three in the third, and they kept control of the game from there on. Arraez went 3-for-5 with two doubles, driving in four and raising his average to .323. Nelson Molina was 2-for-4. LaMonte Wade went 0-for-3 with a walk and is now batting .341. Andro Cutura pitched six innings, giving up two runs on five hits and three walks with five strikeouts.
6:05 Cedar Rapids (Sam Gibbons, 1-2, 6.53) at Great Lakes (Michael Boyle, 1-2, 3.65)
6:05 Rochester at Pawtucket (Roenis Elias, 0-2, 4.50)
6:05 St. Lucie at Fort Myers (Keaton Steele, 1-2, 2.28)
6:35 Chattanooga (David Hurlbut, 2-1, 6.04) at Mobile (Zack Godley, 1-3, 5.24)
Viva la Cinco de Mayo!
Sorry, you guys. Been on vacation fighting robots.
2011
(3 votes, average: 8.67 out of 10)Loading... Phil Hughes vs. Mike Fiers.
I haven't gotten to see an inning of this series yet, as the last few days have been all about moving, unpacking and going through the deepest certification process I've ever been a part of at work. On the upside, the baseball teams I'm missing have a combined 17 wins, so whatever.
Internet will be installed tomorrow and I'll be able to enjoy, or whatever, the team then. Bring it home, dudes.
Per Free's request.
(3 votes, average: 9.67 out of 10)Loading... Byron Buxton starts to heat up. Edgar Corcino and Kohl Stewart lead the Miracle. Another fine start for Randy LeBlanc.
Be with you
The Twins starting the season with a nine-game losing streak was not good. Good teams don't lose a lot of games and even more so don't lose them in long streaks. That got me wondering about how teams with losing streaks fared overall.
It was pointed out here that the Twins streak was more noteworthy because it started the season so it looks even worse. Baseball-Reference only allows searching from the beginning of the season if you want to include all teams over all years so that's the best quick investigations can do. In order to search throughout the season, some work needed to be done.
I processed every season in the modern era through last year and grouped all games together by their streaks. A stretch that went WLLWWW would be a one-game winning streak, a two-game losing streak, and a three-game winning streak. Some brief spot checking of last year's data showed the streaks were properly classified. I merged that with the season results for those seasons in order to associate how teams did given a streak of a certain length.
To start, I decided to look at the range of results for teams with at least a losing streak of every length. The full dataset contains every season since 1900. Here are the number of seasons that contained a losing streak of this length from 1900 through 2015.
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 23 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2117 | 2116 | 2102 | 1896 | 1469 | 1014 | 605 | 377 | 210 | 130 | 73 | 43 | 27 | 19 | 9 | 2 | 4 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 |
First thing that popped out to me was the 2117 seasons with a one-game losing streak but 2116 seasons with a two-game losing streak. I checked the data to find the season, looked it up and determined it was right. If you want to know which team it is, the answer is at the bottom.
I did not want to have to normalize the seasons to match 162-game seasons nor have to deal with seasons shortened by a strike so I processed only the 162-game seasons. Converting that to a box plot for a pretty picture gives us this.
The widths of the box plots represent the number of seasons. The total number of seasons in the data set are 1234. In tabular form it looks like the following.
| Losing streak length | Seasons with that streak | 95th percentile | 75th percentile | Median | 25th percentile | 5th percentile |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1234 | 109 | 89 | 81.0 | 73.0 | 50 |
| 2 | 1234 | 109 | 89 | 81.0 | 73.0 | 50 |
| 3 | 1232 | 109 | 89 | 81.0 | 72.5 | 50 |
| 4 | 1121 | 109 | 88 | 80.0 | 72.0 | 50 |
| 5 | 882 | 109 | 86 | 78.0 | 70.0 | 50 |
| 6 | 605 | 108 | 84 | 76.0 | 68.0 | 50 |
| 7 | 361 | 102 | 82 | 75.0 | 67.0 | 51 |
| 8 | 229 | 103 | 82 | 73.0 | 66.0 | 43 |
| 9 | 121 | 95 | 77 | 71.0 | 64.0 | 51 |
| 10 | 66 | 92 | 76 | 68.0 | 64.0 | 50 |
| 11 | 37 | 89 | 76 | 68.0 | 62.0 | 43 |
| 12 | 23 | 91 | 73 | 67.0 | 59.0 | 53 |
| 13 | 12 | 77 | 70 | 67.0 | 63.0 | 60 |
| 14 | 7 | 70 | 66 | 63.0 | 60.5 | 60 |
| 15 | 4 | 65 | 60 | 53.0 | 51.0 | 51 |
| 17 | 3 | 67 | 64 | 61.0 | 50.5 | 40 |
| 19 | 2 | 57 | 57 | 56.5 | 56.0 | 56 |
| 20 | 1 | 52 | 52 | 52.0 | 52.0 | 52 |
| 21 | 1 | 54 | 54 | 54.0 | 54.0 | 54 |
Nothing knowing except the Twins having a nine-game losing streak, we would expect them to finish with 71 wins. We do know more than that and the preseason projections were not as kind to project the Twins for 81 wins. Many of them were closer to the high 70s so somewhere between the median and 25th percentile marks seems a more likely scenario.
I did another check on what happens if the losing streak happens in the first quarter of the season but the results are very similar. The sample size also becomes a problem as you get into the longer streaks. So I am skipping that and moving on to postseason probabilities.
It was already known at the beginning of the season that reaching the postseason would be unlikely. Well, losing nine straight hurts that a lot.
Note the "0" does not mean did not lose at all but instead is a placeholder to mean the average for all seasons.
Good thing they avoided losing ten games instead of nine, unless they managed to stretch it to eleven games. Not much to say here other than don't lose a lot of games if you want to make the postseason.
In conclusion, don't expect good things this year. The team started out with marginal chances for reaching 81 wins and now they're trying to do it in 153 games.
