‘Good-luck charm’ says Go, Giants!

I wanted to take a break from politics to talk about the wonders of statistics and baseball. With the San Francisco Giants the sole owners of first place again as I write this on September 9, and the first team to 90 wins this season, I was reflecting back on the two MLB games I’ve attended this season. The first was game two of a three-game series between the Seattle Mariners and the Texas Rangers in Seattle on July 3rd. Seattle lost that game, but they took the series two out of three from the Rangers.

Fast forward to August, I attended game three of a four-game series in Oracle Park, the Giants hosting the Rockies. Remarkably, that game was the only game in that series that the Giants lost. Even more remarkably, they had won each of the last six games prior to their 4-1 loss to the Rockies on August 14th, and they also won the three games that followed. In fact, prior to the L on 8/14, the Giants were 10-2 in the month of August, and following the loss to Colorado, they went 15-6 for the remainder of the month, only losing three of those 6 games at home.

So the moral of the story is three-fold: Apparently I am very bad luck; statistics are fascinating; and baseball is the most wonderful sport there is. Go Giants!

— Timothy Lynch, Chico