http://insider.espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/8135108/mlb-pittsburgh-pirates-washington-nationals-hold-win-their-divisionsIndependence Day is most commonly associated with fireworks, going swimming, overcooking hamburgers on the grill, and, if you're like me, imagining the dollars flying out of your wallet as you watch your central air labor in 100-degree heat. When it comes to baseball, July 4 also represents the unofficial beginning of the busy trade season in major league baseball, the sport's equivalent of the mall on Black Friday.
The trade deadline makes July the crucial decision-making month of the season for most teams. It's the last chance to acquire the most coveted veterans or prospects and the point at which teams in the middle need to commit to a direction. So, on a general basis, when is the tipping point for the division during the season, the point at which the team leading becomes the clear favorite?
The old adage states that the team leading the league on July 4 will win the pennant. Obviously, nothing is as simple as that, but sometimes even the craziest bits of conventional wisdom contain a grain of truth. For example, there's actually some data that supports the nugget that stealing third is most effective with one out. Now, it's obvious the July 4 adage isn't literally true -- it doesn't take a memory like a steel trap to remember all the way back to 2011 and the July 4th-leading Indians and Giants watching the playoffs at home.
Looking at baseball history back to 1901, it turns out that 62 percent of teams that enter July 4 with a lead finish the season winning the division. Divisions are smaller now, four to six teams, but the trend remains the same when going back to look at eight- and 10-team leagues without divisions. Great odds if you're playing the lottery, less so for Russian roulette. Leading the league on July 4 isn't a free pass, but you're obviously in a pretty strong position.
Obviously, these odds change based on just how big that lead is. No team has come back from a double-digit deficit on July 4, though most notably, the 1969 Miracle Mets, only 7 1/2 games back at this point, came back from a 10-game lead a month later. Four games back with three months to play may not sound like a huge gap, but more than three-quarters of teams with a four game or greater lead finished in first at season's end.
So, is there a typical tipping point during the season? And if there is, where is it? To look at this, I took the standings for every day in baseball history back to 1901 and looked at how each team with a lead fared after every date. Reviewing the results (see graph below), there's no clear sudden tipping point. Leading teams overall have 40 percent odds at the beginning of May and see that percentage increase by about 10 percentage points every month they still retain the lead. If anything, it indicates that perhaps too much attention is made to the July trade deadline, and that teams extremely confident of competing, and with a definite need, shouldn't be afraid to make an early trade with an obviously rebuilding team.
I didn't look at the wild-card odds for these teams because, thanks to the new playoff format, the relative values of winning the division and winning the wild card have shifted rather dramatically. By adding the single play-in game to allow an extra wild card, winning the division is a juicier prize this year than it has been since 1993, baseball's last year of two-division leagues. Winning the division now gets you more than pride and possibly an extra game at home. Washington Nationals, Pittsburgh Pirates and Chicago White Sox fans have a lot to celebrate this holiday week, but while they can at least start chilling the champagne, they're going to have to wait a while longer to pop the cork.
