What can be divined from the Tigers’ slow start?

Justin Verlander during the White Sox 13-2 Rout

The Tigers’ astounding 0-6 start to the season doesn’t mean much, does it? Maybe, maybe not. Tim Kurkjian (I believe) touted a stat on ESPN that no team that started 0-5 had ever won the World Series. Interestingly, the reason why this hasn’t happened (and only one such team, the Cards in 1985 has even made the World Series) has nothing to do with being able to overcome a slow start.

Rather, I think the real reason is that a true World Series contender is not very likely to start off the season 0-5. It is very unlikely that a legitimate 95 win team will lose five games in a row, much less to start the season. So, the fact that the Tigers are now 0-6 doesn’t mean necessarily that they cannot overcome a slow start, it means that they are not likely to be a true 95 win team.

Thankfully, the math is mad easier because we only have six total games, so we needn’t calculate the chances of losing any six games out of 162 just yet. Let’s just determine the probability that a 100 win team will lose these six specific games.

That is easy to figure out, it is the probability of losing one game to the sixth power. If they are a 100 win team then they will lose approximately 37% of the time. This is 0.37 to the sixth power, or .002. So the chances of a 100 win team losing the specific subset of these six games is 2 out of 1000 if it were a result of random chance.

What if they were a 90 win team? Then they have a 0.44 losing percentage; to the sixth power that is .007 or seven out of 1000. If they are an 85 win team that is a .475 losing percentage and a 1 in 100 chance of losing these specific six games.

What does this tell us? Maybe not much, and I am not 100% sure that this is valid reasoning, but it appears they are 3.5 times more likely to be a 90 win team than a 100 win team, and are 70 times more likely to be an 85 win team than a 90 win team.

I will admit being surprised at the huge difference between the 90 win team and the 85 win team. Feel free to double check or critique my reasoning with regard to these specific six games. Please note though that I am not determining the chances of them losing any 6 consecutive games during the season, because I was curious about why teams can’t come back from even a 5 game streak to win a WS. I think the reason is that a real World Series contender is not very likely to lose its first five or six games, given the calculations above.

Of course the reason it may not mean much is that an 85 win team can, by random chance alone, win 72 games or 97, depending on the standard deviation and just plain old good luck. So it is still possible that they could win 95 games and cruise, but if the slow start is an indicator then it is far more likely that they will not.