What’s with the Streak?
The hometown baseball team just concluded a rather remarkable streak- winning a team-record 17 games in a row. To put that into perspective, the St. Louis Cardinals have been playing professional baseball (before 1900 as the Brown Stockings, Browns, and Perfectos) for 140 years and have played over 21,000 games! And yet in their entire history, which includes 23 National league pennants and 11 World Series, they had never done that before.
For this Cardinal team to be the record-setter of consecutive wins is beyond surprising. As of September 11th, the team had collected 71 wins and 69 losses – the epitome of mediocrity. They had given up more runs than they had scored and had trouble beating even the worst of teams – in one important 10 game stretch in late June/early July against bottom-dwellers Detroit, Pittsburgh and Colorado they lost 8 of those games. They literally handed games to their opponents, walking more batters than any team in baseball and approaching the all-time record for free passes with the bases loaded – 29! And they made a regular practice of blowing games they were leading in the 9th inning. Just five days before the streak began, they led by four runs in the bottom of the 9th in a critical game against first place Milwaukee. Taking no chances, the Cardinals had their closer into the game against the Brewers’ bottom of the order. But before the dust had cleared the Cards managed to give up a walk-off pitch-hit grand slam – to a career .206 hitter who at 6 feet 270 pounds looks better suited for sumo wrestling than connecting with a 95 mph+ fastball.
Prior to the streak the Redbirds’ season was categorized by heartbreak loss after heartbreak loss. Aside from the best defense in the game, there was nothing to suggest that this team was anything special. And yet they have now carved a memorable place in Cardinal history. The fact that they accomplished the first dozen wins all against teams fighting for a playoff berth or division title, including four against the pitching-dominant Brewers in Milwaukee, made it all the more incredible. And it was especially sweet to break the record against their greatest rival, the Chicago Cubs – in Wrigley Field no less. More importantly, the streak transformed the Cardinals’ statistical chances of making the playoffs from less than 3% to 100% in a little over two weeks! It also assured that the Cardinals would have a winning record for the 14th season in a row – only the Yankees currently have more.
The Cardinals’ winning streak was the longest in the National League in 86 years! The all-time record belongs to the 2017 Cleveland Indians who won an amazing 22 straight games. (The New York Giants actually went 27 games in a row without a defeat in 1916 but it included one tie – yes, there was a time in baseball history where they thought it was somehow acceptable to tie a game, soccer-style.)
Other sports have had their own amazing team streaks. In football it’s the 1972 Miami Dolphins who won every football game they played that year, including the Super Bowl – the only team in NFL history to do so (although it only took 14 wins at the time). In soccer the longest winning streak in Premier League history is also 14. (No, you American soccer-challenged fans, it wasn’t Ted Lasso’s squad, but rather the 2002 “Gunners” from Arsenal.) In hockey, the most impressive winning streak in my view belongs to the Montreal Canadiens who won 5 straight Stanley Cups in a row (matched by the Yankees 5 straight World Series).
Many consider the greatest team sports streak to be that of college basketball’s UCLA Bruins who won a whopping 88 straight basketball games and a mind-boggling 7 straight National Championships from 1967 through 1973 under the tutelage of the great John Wooden There wasn’t much mystery filling out an NCAA bracket winner in those years! But it’s actually UConn’s Women’s Basketball team which holds the longest winning streak of any major sports team. From 2014 to 2017 they won 111 games in a row! And to show their sheer dominance, only three of those wins were by less than 10 points. When they finally experienced a loss, 867 days later, it was by a mere two points – in Overtime.
What causes a team to go off on a mammoth run that makes them virtually unbeatable? For the greatest teams of all time – like the Yankees and Canadiens of the 50’s, the UCLA Bruins of the late 60’s and early 70’s and the modern- day Lady Huskies- they had far superior talent than their competition. But how does one explain a team like the 2021 Cardinals, a solid team with lots of good parts for sure, but not among the most talented teams in baseball? (Indeed, there’s likely not a single pitcher the Cardinals used in the entire streak who could even start for the Los Angeles Dodgers if they had their full assortment of pitchers available.)
Mathematicians and statisticians might argue that a streak is just a random event to be expected every so often. If you were to toss a coin into the air 21,000 times (one for approx. every Cardinal game ever played) you should get close to 10,500 heads. But there’s also a reasonable chance that at some point during this exhausting experiment that heads (or tails) might come up 17 times in a row. Indeed, Vegas sports books pay 20,000-1 on a 15-game parlay (they typically won’t take any more games than that), suggesting that the prospects of winning all 15 should happen about that often (leaving some room for the “juice”). However, these odds assume the chances of each proposition in the parlay to be 50-50. Here, the Cardinals were sizeable underdogs in several of these games. And they won 17 in a row. So, the actual odds were likely closer to 100,000-1!
But most of us who play and watch sports do not buy the pure randomness of the streak. There is something more at play. The biggest factor is surely confidence. In sports, like most things in life, feeling confident is paramount to success and a streaking team is swimming in the stuff. If you expect to win, you stand a greater chance of prevailing. The converse is also true. I suspect that the players on the 1963 Philadelphia Phillies, who lost a record-setting 23 consecutive games, must have had the unsettling feeling before the game even began that they were about to lose again.
And then there’s the collective motivation factor of players on a team with a long winning streak. They are more apt to dive for a ball, run into a wall, sacrifice personal success for that of the team and hustle their ass off. They don’t want the streak to end or, worse, be the one responsible for it ending.
Best of all, when you’re are on huge winning streak it seems as though everything you do comes up roses and every break goes your way. Case in point: the Cardinals’ team record 15th straight win. They were losing 4-2 to the Cubs in the 7th inning when star third basemen Nolan Arenado crushed one to left. He thought it was leaving the park but the wind held it up and the ball bounced off the Wrigley ivy to the left fielder, whose throw to second arrived before he did. Though not a fast man, Arenado was able to barely sneak a few fingers just under the second basemen’s glove and onto the base a fraction of a second before the tag. Had he been out, the inning would have ended before the Cardinals rallied for a 5-4 lead.
Then in the bottom of the 8th the Cubs had the bases loaded with one out. A ground-ball was hit to first basemen Paul Goldschmidt who quickly decided to go home with his toss to prevent the tying tun (rather than the more conventional second-to-first double play to try to end the inning). The Cards not only got the tying runner at the plate but also the inning-ending double play thanks to some generous Cubs base running and a run-down for the ages – from the first basemen to the catcher to the third baseman to the second baseman to the catcher again to the centerfielder and finally to the shortstop who applied the tag (3-2-5-4-2-8-6 for those scoring at home). I expect it’s the only time in major league history that there has ever been a double play precisely like that – perhaps a 10 million to 1 proposition.
But the baseball Gods weren’t finished smiling on the Redbirds. In the top of the 9th with the Cards clinging to a one-run lead, the flamboyant and speedy Harrison Bader hit a routine single to center that he decided to try to convert into a double. The throw beat him by a significant amount and the fielder had the ball in his glove, but Bader somehow managed to avoid the tag with a long head-first slide that took him around the side and past the base. He then quickly dove back to the bag, barely eluding the second baseman’s tag. Bader then stole third base. With two outs Cubs’ pitcher Tommy Nance struck out Card’s hitter (and Swedish imposter) Lars Nootbar to end the inning. But not so fast! Normally reliable Cubs’ backstop Willson Contreras dropped the third strike and it managed to trickle slowly between his legs and several feet away. The daring Bader, playing with house money, decided to try and scamper home. Once again, the throw from the catcher to the pitcher covering home beat him. Once again, the fielder was waiting for Bader with the ball in his glove – positioned perfectly on the third base side of home plate so that Bader’s slide would take him directly into the tag before he crossed home. But at the last second, during his desperate slide, Bader raised his front foot ever so slightly above the ground and the pitcher’s glove managed to catch only Bader’s back foot. By this time, Bader’s front foot had come down to earth and touched the plate – a millisecond earlier than the tag. All in all, one of the craziest and luckiest trips around the bases I’ve ever seen. It provided the Cardinals an insurance run (and two more followed) which proved critical as the Cubbies hit a home run in the bottom of the 9th. When a team is this hot, it can do no wrong.
The streak concept extends beyond sports. In the gambling world, much has been discussed and debated about it. The difference there is that humans have little control over the outcome. Yes, they blow, kiss or otherwise awkwardly fondle the dice for “good luck” before heaving them across the green carpet at a craps table. But they can’t control what the bouncing dice say. Nor can they control the cards that are randomly dealt in blackjack, or the decisions made by six strangers sitting at the table whether “to hit or stick” that invariably impacts their own outcome (although by keeping track of the cards dealt they can improve their decision-making). And yet most folks who have played a lot of craps or blackjack fervently believe in the concept of the hot table. You know the dream – where the roller holds court for an hour without “crapping out” or where the blackjack dealer busts over and over and over again. The idea of a streak like this being predictable defies any logical explanation or mathematical probability. But don’t try to convince the majority of folks who spend a lot of their life at a casino that it’s not real.
And then there’s the streaks in life – both good and bad. They are usually not logical or the least bit fair. Some folks appear to get break after break – be it with health, family, marriage, friends, money and/or business (though those with a good start in life tend to have a lot more “breaks,” and you never really know what’s going on behind the scenes in someone’s life or head). Others seem to get bad luck in spades. Sometimes the same person who is already born into poverty and with a chronic disease also loses a parent in the World Trade Center, has a close friend killed by a drunk driver, has their identity stolen and loses their job when a contagious virus spreads across the nation.
It also sure seems like good and bad things come in bunches- some swear in “threes.” Mathematicians and persons of logic say that’s absurd. But many folks believe in the streak. And some believe that believing in it makes it more likely to occur. It may seem crazy when a ballplayer consumes only chicken on game days simply because the last time he ate chicken he got three hits or made it to every base safe by a fraction of a second. But just looking at all the silly ticks, rituals and superstitions of professional athletes, and baseball players in particular, there’s no doubt that most are believers. They, like many of us, are searching for the magic of that rare big winning streak.
