Sunday, April 18, 2010

Yankees win first four series for first time since Coolidge

I've been really happy the Yankees took two out of three from three very strong teams (Red Sox, Ray, Angels) to start the season and now the first two fro the Rangers. What I didn't know was this amazing Yankees statistic yesterday:
When the Yankees last won their first four series, Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth anchored the middle of the batting order, Earle Combs and Tony Lazzeri provided the power and Bob Shawkey was on the mound. That was in 1926 and even without extraordinarily fast starts since then in many years, New York dominated baseball.
I remember that even in the wonderful 1998 season they had a bad start against the Angels, but this is incredible. You have to figure the chance of winning a series for the Yankees is 50% (if not better.) Winning the first four should then happen on average once every eight seasons. It should have happened about ten times since 1926. Of course with enough statistics -- and baseball has enough statistics -- something improbable will come up, but I'm really surprised.

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