Tapp-ing Into The Numbers: Fast Start Important For MLB Teams
They say hope springs eternal in spring training. Each of the 30 MLB teams has a certain degree of optimism and many feel they can not only make the playoffs but also contend for the championship. All too often, however, April brings a dose of reality when the games start to count and losses start to pile up.
Getting off to a good start in April sure helps. Consider this: Only seven of the 30 playoffs teams in the last three MLB seasons played under .500 in the first month of the season. Furthermore, only two playoff teams from 2014-16 played under .400 in the first month of the season.
Take a look at the standings just one week into the 2017 campaign. The team with the worst record in baseball last season, the Minnesota Twins, have gotten off to a great start and are 5-1… their .833 winning percentage is currently the best in baseball.
Let’s take a look at how well each of the 30 teams has played in the first month of the season over the past three years. The New York Mets top the list with a .634 winning percentage in the first month of the season from 2014-16. The Detroit Tigers are the only other team with a winning percentage over .600 in the first month the last three years at .609. The worst team in the first month from 2014-16 were the Arizona Diamondbacks; they had a winning percentage of .397.
Here’s a look at the winning percentage of each team in first month of the baseball season (games played in March and April are included) in the last three campaigns.
New York Mets .634
Detroit .609
Kansas City .577
St. Louis .568
Washington .568
Chicago Cubs .559
Los Angeles Dodgers .548
Baltimore .537
Chicago White Sox .534
Boston .534
Oakland .526
Colorado .521
New York Yankees .514
Pittsburgh .514
San Francisco .507
Los Angeles Angels .493
Texas .493
Seattle .486
Miami .486
Philadelphia .479
Tampa Bay .472
Toronto .453
Milwaukee .452
Atlanta .451
Cincinnati .438
San Diego .434
Houston .419
Minnesota .414
Cleveland .400
Arizona .397
Photo by Ron Woelfel
Jerry Tapp
Jerry Tapp is a freelance writer from Racine, WI with a major concentration on sports statistics and numbers that define sports teams and players. He began his foray into sports stats-focused writing as a regular contributor to the “Numbers” column in Inside Sports magazine in the mid-1980’s and then began writing a weekly “Stats on Tapp” column for the Racine Journal Times. That column was eventually nationally syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate. He later wrote sports stats items for the Washington Post under the “Stat of the Day” heading. After launching his blog, www.statsontapp.com in 2011, Jerry turned his sports stats attention to sports websites. He wrote regularly for Bleacher Report, BallHyped, football.com and Heavy.com. Today he keeps busy writing weekly columns of stats-centric articles for three sports websites, Today’s Pigskin (NFL), Today’s Knuckleball (MLB) and Today’s Fastbreak (NBA), and as a monthly contributor to the Milwaukee Brewers “GameDay” publication that is distributed to fans attending games at Miller Park.