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.