What are the chances?

Fox reported last night that the Detroit Tigers were 19-31 in their last fifty games of the 2006 regular season, the worst ever such record for a playoff team. (St. Louis was 22-28 over the same stretch, the second worst ever.) 19 wins in 50 games is a winning percentage of .380. A whole season like that would have put them smack between the Royals and the Devil Rays, competing for the worst record in baseball. (Note that the Royals won 62 games, the D-Rays 61, so there's no room between them.)

What are the chances that a single team would start 76-36, and finish 19-31? Let's assume (naively, of course) that they have the same chance of winning each game. The most likely explanation is that their underlying winning percentage is about .586 (exactly how they finished), in which case this pair of events still has a probability of less than 1 in 50,000. Not very likely. But, to be fair, no particular event is all that likely in this scenario. Still, if they had won 66 of their first 112, and then 29 of their last 50, for a more balanced season, the probability would be more than .008, and more than 500 times as likely.

I think it's fair to conclude what everyone already suspects: the Tigers of the last fifty games were not the same as the Tigers of the first hundred. Whereas the Cardinals snapped out of their late season funk to hold off the Astros and win the division, and then won the first game of their Divisional Playoff against the Padres, the Tigers fell all the way to second in the AL Central and have now lost their first game with the Yankees. Do they stand a chance against the Bronx juggernaut? Let's hope the 76-36 Tigers are still in there somewhere.

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