MLB '24 Regular Season Thread

Speaking of the White Sox, what the hell happened to Tim Anderson? Two time All-Star to out of baseball in two years?

 

Congrats to the White Sox. It's really, really hard to lose 21 straight games in the Major Leagues, where one pitcher can have a great day and carry a team to victory.

 

Funny enough, the 1988 Baltimore Orioles -- which gave 12-year-old Cosmo plenty of agita -- ended their 21-game season-opening losing streak by beating ... the White Sox.

 

Twenty-one straight losses should be impossible.

 

Yeah, the "impossibility" of this reminded me of an old quote from Benny Lefebvre (Jimmy's dad), who was the coach of a good high school baseball program in L.A. "Baseball is the great equalizer. On a given day, I could take this team to USC and we could win. In football, no way."

 

In 1961, 11-year old me went to summer camp for three weeks in upstate NY. The Phils lost the day I left. They did not win again (I didn't know, I was in the woods) until after I got back. They broke the 23-game losing streak on the final game of a road trip and several thousand fans were there to meet them at the airport. Relief pitcher Frank Sullivan advised his teammates, "let's leave by twos and threes so they can't get us all with one burst."

 

In a season of weirdness, it would be the most A's thing to be the team that lost to the Sox.

 

What are the actual odds of a 21-game losing streak occurring? (I was told there would be no math.)

 

To quote Lou Brown: "Pretty god-dam fucking rare."

 

The White Sox are 5-5 against the team with the best record in baseball and 22-83 against everybody else.

 

I don't know who that is, but in the age of analytics one would think -- assume -- that any major strategic differences between teams have been nullified. So the reason for that extreme lossage must be that the Sox have far inferior players compared to the teams they played during the streak.

 

Given that any series of baseball games is analogus to coin flips, even in the case of a particularly bad team, losing 20 games in a row would be roughly equal to flipping a coin and having it land on heads all 20 times.

According to a coin flip calculator online, that's a 1 in 1,048,576 chance. To equal the 1961 Phillies and their 23 consecutive would push those odds to 8 million to 1.

Consider there have been somewhere in the neighborhood of 225,000 major league games played since 1876, and only three have been that bad since the addition of the American League, the White Sox are in select (terrible) company.