With both the Dodgers and Mets winning by a score of 1-0 yesterday, Jim Storer wrote and asked how often it happens that there are multiple 1-0 in a day. After the letter arrived, Arizona and Cincinnati played one as well. Since 1957, multiple 1-0 games in a day happened 237 times, or about 4 or five times a year.
Since 1957, the start of the Day by Day Database, the majors hosted 104,429 games, of which 2225 resulted in a score of 1-0. So the overall probability of a 1-0 game is .0213, or about 2%. As you might expect, the probability of a 1-0 game changes with the run scoring environment (click for a larger image):
Runs per game on left axis, percent 1-0 games on right axis.
As you can see, when scoring goes down, 1-0 games increase, with 1968 the best year to see a 1-0 score, 1999 the worst. It turns out there is a very good relationship between scoring and the probability of a 1-0 game (click for a larger image):
Regression equation for predicting percent of 1-0 games based on MLB runs per game.
So the probability of seeing a 1-0 game this year, based on the regression equation is about 0.0186 (percentage divided by 100). (The actual percentage for this year is close at 1.97.) On a day in which 15 games are played, there is a 0.031 chance of seeing at least two 1-0 games this season, or about 3%. Since there are about five full schedule days a week, and 26 weeks to the baseball season, that works out to about 130 days of 15 games. So we can, indeed, expect about four days this season with at least two 1-0 games. Halfway through the season, we have that. There were two on 4/22, and of course three yesterday, 7/1. It seems the great number of games in the schedule due to expansion is balancing the higher run environment.
Posted by David Pinto at 12:23 pm | Games, Uncategorized | Permalink | No Comments
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