Winning is fun. The Cubs rolled through the early portion of their schedule, and used that cushion to weather a midseason blip in late June and early July. Then they came roaring out of the All-Star break, and are now poised to win a tenth straight game. Every team experiences ebbs and flows over the long, grueling baseball season. To paraphrase an old saying, you are never as good as you are at your best, and you are never as bad as you’re at the worst. In 2016, the Cubs have been historically great at their best, and well below average at their worst.
The Cubs play the St. Louis Cardinals tonight. The series has always held special meaning for the respective fandoms, but often times for the Cubs the possibility of beating the Cardinals was their postseason. Things are vastly different this year as the Cubs are poised to do a few things tonight that have not happened in many years. A win would give the Cubs a staggering 13 game lead in the division. The Cubs have never had a division lead that large, and the last time they had a league lead that big was during Prohibition.
The other rarely seen feat on the North Side of Chicago riding on tonight’s outcome is that aforementioned 10 game win streak. The Cubs have not had a winning streak of 10 or more games in 15 years. The Cubs won 12 straight from May 19 to June 2, 2001. That would represent a high point in the season as the team would lose first place for good on August 18 with a 26-31 record in the final months of the season. There have been only two other major league franchises that have gone longer since their last 10 game winning streak. The Baltimore Orioles last accomplished this feat on September 22, 1999, and the Marlins have never won more than nine games straight.
A tenth straight win tonight would be the second streak of 10 or more victories this season and the fifty-ninth streak since 2000. Three teams have managed to win 10 or more straight in the same season during that time frame, with the Blue Jays being the most recent. The 54 teams that have had at least one such streak in the years between 2000 and 2015 have done remarkably well. It should be pretty obvious that teams that win a lot of games in a row tend to win a lot of games in games in general, but those 53 teams have averaged 90.2 wins. It must be pointed out that 19 of those 54 teams did not make the postseason, but only 8 finished the season with a record below .500.
The Cubs are a good team and are a mortal lock to make the postseason. Anything can happen in baseball, but the Cubs chances of reaching the postseason are 100 percent according to Baseball Prospectus for a reason. As satisfying as a sweep of the Cardinals this series would be for Cubs fans, it is largely meaningless in the grand scheme of a season that will be defined by postseason success or failure. “The playoffs are a crapshoot” is a favorite saying of many. There does not appear to be any secret sauce to getting hot at the right time, but perhaps a team that wins 10 or more in the regular season is more capable of doing that in the postseason.
The 35 playoff teams that have managed to get that hot during the regular season have been better than the original selection of 54 teams. Those 35 teams averaged over 94 wins in the regular season. They managed to win an average of 3.8 postseason games in that season. Excluding the new Wild Card game, teams have won an average 0.83 series in the postseason. Here is how that stacks up compared to all playoff teams.
| Season Wins | Playoff Wins | Series Wins | Longest Winning Streak | |
| All Teams w/10+ W Streak | 90.2 | 2.48 | 0.54 | 11.0 |
| Playoff Teams w/10+ W Streak | 94.7 | 3.83 | 0.83 | 11.2 |
| All Playoff Teams | 94.3 | 3.97 | 0.85 | 8.5 |
The sample size is small like everything involving the postseason, but the 136 playoff teams from 2000-2015 fared slightly better than both groups of teams that won 10 or more in the regular season. The results are not terribly surprising in finding that regular season winning streaks are not predictive of postseason victory totals. Here is a scatter point of all the playoff teams to demonstrate how little insight we gained from this exercise.
Regular season wins appear to be more predictive than winning streaks. The data for both all playoff teams and just those teams with 10 or more straight victories indicate an inverse relationship, but the correlation coefficient is so low (-0.08 and -0.14) to indicate no relationship at all in the small sample. Regular season wins has a slight positive relationship at 0.44, and so how long a team can play at their best in the regular season does not seem to have any predictive power for postseason success.
Winning is fun, but it seems as though winning a bunch of games in a row only makes it more likely that a team reaches the postseason. It appears like that old line about not being good as your best is true after all. These streaks become interesting bits of trivia like the 2002 Athletics 20 game win streak or the Marlins never winning more than nine in a row, but appears to tell us little about the most likely final outcome of a team’s season. However, playing to become trivia answers is all that the Cubs have to do until after October 2.
Lead photo courtesy David Banks—USA Today Sports.