July 27, 2011: Mariners 9, Yankees 2 (44-60)

On July 27, 2011, the Seattle Mariners played the New York Yankees. The Mariners won the game by a score of 9 to 2, a feat that was quite remarkable, considering it was only the 44th time all season that the Mariners had won a game. Nobody expected the Mariners to win this game. I mean, seriously, they had only won 43 games before this! What were the odds that they would win another one? Well... pretty good, apparently.

The actual most surprising thing about the game is that the Mariners won so easily. Nine to two? That’s a blowout! The Mariners amassed a whopping 17 hits, while only allowing six to the supposedly intimidating Yankees lineup. Sheer dominance, that's what that is. Could this be a sign of things to come? After all, the Yankees are a very good team. Possibly the best in the league. For the Mariners to beat them, and beat them so convincingly, in Yankee stadium... that’s a hell of a performance. There’s no way to spin it other than the Mariners played great. Flat-out great. And I’ll tell you what... I think it could continue.

Consider this: in the past 24 hours, the Mariners have won one game and lost zero. That’s a one hundred percent winning percentage, if you haven't figured that out already. That’s incredible. No team in baseball has ever come anywhere close to putting up a one hundred percent winning percentage. It’s unprecedented. But here the Mariners are, doing it. Can they keep it up? That’s less clear. We’ll have to wait for Friday’s game to figure that out. But if the Mariners win on Friday, watch out! They’ll have then won one hundred percent of their games over a stretch of multiple games. That’s a one hundred percent correlation between games played and games won. Here is a graph of what that would look like:

Included is a forecast of future performance, generated via least-squares regression. Note that the r² is equal to one, the highest it could possibly be. The evidence is all there. Statistics don’t lie: if the Mariners win tomorrow, they can be expected to win every game for the rest of the season. If that happens, they might even make the playoffs!

I know, I know, that's great news. It really is awesome. Don't get too excited, though. I hate to rain on the parade, but, unfortunately, the scientific method and proper statistical analysis requires that I explore alternate hypotheses. And there's one possible scenario that the above chart doesn't account for: Friday’s game still needs to be played, and there’s a chance, just a chance, that the Mariners might lose. And if they do… they just might never win again.