2017: Just How Streaky Were We?

For every Mariner Muse released this season, we tracked our happiness according to 5 different team categories. Eventually, we charted the results, which essentially showed that the Mariners were a C-grade baseball team in 2017. (For more on the chart click here, otherwise it is pictured below).

This exercise was unique and revealed many things, but what stuck with me most was it showed how streaky my feelings toward the team were. At one point in the season, I texted my fellow editors: “This is the greatest team ever, we are winning the World Series” – but then there was also that time when four pitchers from the original rotation were on the DL, and I actually looked forward to Yovani Gallardo starts. With little to think about after the season, I started wondering whether the 2017 team was actually that streaky, or if I had simply always been hyperbolic toward the Ners and had just never seen it physically tracked.

Thankfully, Baseball Reference exists. And this means that pretty much any baseball stat out there exists, including the result of every single game for every season in recent history. With the data available, I just had to think of a way to measure streakiness in a season. Here’s how I did it:

A “streak” is when you string consecutive victories – or losses – together. You can have a 3-game winning streak, a 10-game losing streak, and so on and so forth. As long as the same result occurs on back-to-back games, it is officially considered a “streak.” Therefore, the minimum streak is two.

So I looked at the season in twos. Any time the Mariners won consecutive games, I counted it as a “streak win,” and any time they lost consecutively, I counted it as a “streak loss.” Any W/L or L/W combinations were not included, as they are not considered streaks. Under this approach, longer streaks – say, the Mariners 6-game losing streak in September – was considered 5 sets of “streak losses,” since that’s how many times the Ners lost consecutive games in that stretch.

I went back as far as 2001. Here’s what the data yielded:

Looking at these results, it appears the 2017 squad was above average in terms of streakiness, with the 5th most series wins or losses since 2001. (Side note: they were pretty balanced in terms of both winning and losing streaks…which I guess isn’t a bad thing? It certainly corroborates my initial feelings).

But one thing I noticed was that two teams above the 2017 team were either really good or really bad. The 2001 team won 116 games and the 2010 team lost 101 games. This severity makes sense: when you lose a lot or win a lot, you are inherently going to be stringing similar results together, whether they be W’s or L’s. The 2017 finished (kind of) near .500, which means that it’s more notable that they had as many “streak wins” and “streak losses” as they did.

To attempt to make sense of this, I then divided the number of “series wins” and “series losses” by the number of total wins and losses for the season, which would show the percentage of overall wins or losses that were accumulated in a streak. The table is here:

This supports my original hunch: the 2017 Mariners were super streaky. They jumped the 2001 juggernaut and the 2010 opposite-of-a-juggernaut, and proved to be the 3rd streakiest team in the ballclub’s recent history. This validates my exhaustion as a fan, which came from the many peaks and valleys we all went through while watching this past season. 2017 was a hell of a weird year.

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