Hanging on for dear life

Hey, we Phillies phans are still breathing!  You wouldn’t have thought it would turn out to be quite so tough after the good guys had taken an 8-2 lead, but it wouldn’t be the Phils if they’d just cruised in from there.  Now the Series stands at 3-2, but we’re heading back up to the Bronx on Wednesday (and, one hopes, Thursday).

So, what kind of chance is there for the World Champs to defend their title?  We’ve already discussed the problem of being down 3-1.  Adding last year’s happy result to the data I presented last October, we find that only five (12.2%) of the 41 clubs that found themselves in that predicament were able to dig themselves all the way out.  The good news, such as it is, is that three of those teams did it the way the Phils would have to—taking Game 5 at home, then winning two games in their opponent’s ballpark.

The situation is now 3-2, and it doesn’t matter all that much how it got to be this way.  Does WLLLW (the way this Series has gone thus far) really differ from LWWLL or LLWLW or any of the other seven paths to the current state of the Series?  So let’s take a look at what’s happened in previous 3-2 World Series. 

We’re now in the midst of the 105th World Series.  It started in 1903, but no Series was played in 1904 or 1994.  In four of them—1903 and 1919-1921—the victor had to win five games rather than the standard four.  We’ll ignore those oddballs, but retain the three in which tie games were called due to darkness (1907, 1912, and 1922).  Thus, our dataset consists of exactly 100 completed World Series.

Of those, 57 Series have gone at least six games.  Every one of those, of course, stood at 3-2 through five games.  We’ll look at those Series from the perspective of the trailing club, since that is unfortunately the case for the Phils right now.  We’ll consider whether the Series eventually ended after six games or went to the full seven, whether the trailing club came back to win the Series, and whether the final game(s) were played at home or on the road.

Obviously, if the Series ends after six games, it’s because the team trailing after five lost the next game.  That’s happened 22 times, 38.6% of all 3-2 World Series.  The first year it occurred was 1906 (White Sox over Cubs), and the most recent one was 2003 (Marlins over Yankees); until this year, every Series since that one has ended after four or five games.  The majority of those six-game Series, 13 of them (59.1%), ended in the winner’s home park.  The Yankees have been involved in nine of those six-game World Series, winning the Series 4-2 in 1923, 1936, 1951, 1953, 1977, 1978, and 1996, losing in six games in 1981 and the aforementioned 2003.  The Phils, now playing in only their seventh World Series, won it all in six games in 1980 and lost a six-game Series in 1993.

The good news for the Phillies is that the trailing team has won Game 6 over 60% of the time.  The bad news for the Phillies is that almost 2/3 of those Series-tying Game 6 victories, 23 of the 35 (65.7%), took place at the trailing team’s ballpark.  Taking the entire set of 57 Games 6, the trailing club has gone 23-9 (.719) at home and 12-13 (.480) on the road.

If we assume that the Phillies can take Game 6 in Yankee Stadium—based on prior World Series history, it’s more likely than I’d anticipated when I started looking at these data—then Game 7 is essentially a coinflip, irrespective of location.  In the 23 Series where the trailing team evened things at home, they won again 12 times but lost to the visitors in 11 Series.  That’s a .522 winning percentage.  When the trailing team takes Game 6 on the road, their Game 7 record is 6-6.

So winning Games 6 and 7 on the road to win the World Series can be done.  The 1926 and 1934 Cardinals, 1952 and 1958 Yankees, 1968 Tigers, and 1979 Pirates are the proof.  But…

It’s been 30 years since the We Are Fam-i-ly Bucs accomplished this prodigious feat.  Nobody has ever done it in Yankee Stadium, where the Bronx Bombers strut like arrogant SOBs in front of their even more arrogant fans.  Even if I were an optimist, I’d hold out little hope for such a miraculous reversal.  How sweet it would be, though, if somehow, some way, it turned out that way.

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Many thanks to Sean Forman’s wondrous Baseball-Reference.com site for offering up the basic data from which I drew these data.

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