After the Yankee losses in 12 and 14 innings over the past week, I was thinking that hard as it is to win an away game in any playoff series, winning an extra-inning playoff game has to be near impossible.
But I don’t know how impossible. Anybody got the numbers on how well the home team does after the ninth in playoffs?
All postseason games, 1995-2003:
2003: Home teams were 5-2 in extra-inning games
2002: no e-i games
2001: Home teams were 2-0 in extra-inning games
2000: Home teams were 2-2 in extra-inning games
1999: Home teams were 5-1 in extra-inning games
1998: Home teams were 1-2 in extra-inning games
1997: Home teams were 2-1 in extra-inning games
1996: Home teams were 2-3 in extra-inning games
1995: Home teams were 4-4 in extra-inning games
1995-2003: Home teams were 23-15 in extra-inning games, a .605 winning percentage. The sample size is small, and I don’t know what the home team’s WP is in all other playoff games, but it strikes me as not statistically significant, much less ‘near impossible’.
Say, how’d you get that so quickly? Is there a site that’ll do that for you, do you have software, or is it all in your head?
I researched the information at this site: www.retrosheet.org. They are an incredible resource for historical game-by-game information. I just quickly scanned each year’s collection of postseason game scores by sight, and recorded the results of each extra-inning game on a scratch pad. Elementary.
Thanks, RX. I didn’t realize there were so many, and I’m really surprised that the away team wins so often.
From 1999-2003, though, the home team was 14-4, which may be skewing my memory. Too soon to tell whether that’s just a statistical blip or if conditions have changed.