BASEBALL

The Tigers have not played well on the road the last few years.  Probably this is mostly variation over a small group of games put on top of the normal small home team advantage in Major League Baseball.  I was curious if the Tigers did significantly better in some games of a series than others.  Maybe Johnny Damon kept the guys out drinking too late the first night in a new town.

So here is what I did.  In 2009 and 2010 I looked at all the series that had 3 games.  It didn’t matter how many were scheduled.  I didn’t want to look at two and four game series because the second game could play more like a second game or a last game if there were some strange effect involving second games or last games.

Now this causes a problem.  There are only 35 three game series.  So statistically you can’t make any real conclusion.  Even if you could you would want to compare to other MLB teams .  Maybe all teams do better the second game of a series because they often travel before the first game and the home team may already have been home and not had to travel.  It may also be that that a team is better at day or night games.  Third games are more likely to be day games.  I did not track whether a series was the first, second or third series in a road trip.  I think you get the idea.  We shouldn’t conclude anything.  Let’s do it anyway!

The Tigers were 0.400 in game ones, 0.371 in game twos and 0.514 in game threes.

Since it is only a 4 game difference on a small sample it probably means nothing.  I’m going to blame Damon and Laird for keeping the team out late the first day in each city, though.