TODAY’S SPORTSTAT-
By JERRY TAPP
The Houston Astros punched their ticket to the 2017 World Series with a Game Seven win over the New York Yankees in the American League Championship Series (ALCS).
For the Yankees, it was their fifth deciding game playoff series loss (Game 5 of a five-game series or Game 7 of a seven-game series) since 2000.
The Yankees five deciding-game playoff series losses is second to the Oakland A’s who’ve lost six-deciding game losses this century.
There have been 40 playoff series since 2000 that have gone to a deciding fifth game or seventh game. Following are the number of deciding game series losses for each MLB team since 2000.
6: Oakland
5: New York Yankees
4: Cleveland
3: Atlanta, Washington
2: Boston, Houston, St. Louis, Texas
1: Arizona, Baltimore, Chicago Cubs, Cincinnati, Kansas City, L.A. Dodgers, N.Y. Mets, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Tampa Bay
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.