June 29, 2011: Mariners 3, Braves 5 (39-42)

Mariners 3, Braves 5: A Thorough Analysis


Abstract:
The Seattle Mariners lost to the Atlanta Braves by a score of 5-3.


Introduction:
On June 29, 2011, the Seattle Mariners and Atlanta Braves played a baseball game. Atlanta scored five runs. Seattle scored three runs. For scoring more runs, Atlanta was credited with one win. Seattle was credited with one loss.


Analysis:
Seattle scored five runs, while Atlanta scored three. Five is ordinally superior to three, so the decision to award Atlanta with the win was made correctly.

Frame-by-frame tape study confirmed that no unrecorded runs were scored, leaving no doubt as to the validity of the game's outcome.

The Mariners scored three runs. Their season average (today’s game excluded) is 3.43 runs per game, marking today’s offensive performance as 87.6% of average. That’s worse than usual, but not by enough to say anything meaningful.

The Mariners allowed five runs. Their season average (today’s game excluded) is 3.56 runs per game, so today’s run prevention performance was 40.4% worse than average. That may or may not prove to be statistically significantly different from a normal game, but either way it’s still unlikely to be truly meaningful.

The Mariners scored 37.5% of the total runs in the game. Regression analysis reveals that this number being below 50% has a perfect one-to-one correlation with the Mariners losing baseball games. However, the data used was only 2011 Seattle Mariners games, so the study would need to be re-run with different teams and seasons in order to be generalizable. It’s entirely possible that the 2011 Mariners are a special case.

Exactly 18 half-innings were played. This, too, has a perfect correlation with the Mariners losing, but only when the sample is limited to home games* (*the recent Florida Marlins series was designated as “away” for the purposes of this study). The same caveats about generalizability mentioned in the last paragraph apply here as well.

Going forward, the data suggests that, if the Mariners wish to win baseball games, they should try to score more runs than their opponents.


Conclusion:
The Seattle Mariners lost to the Atlanta Braves by a score of 5-3. The Mariners most emphatically did not win. If the same score occurs in the future, it is almost certain that the Mariners will not win.