147

The White Sox played two extra-inning affairs with the Tigers over the weekend, winning the first and losing the second. In both games, the team that came from behind to tie it up went on to win. That started me thinking: How often does this shift in momentum lead to victory? Well, the games this weekend are the only Sox games to go longer than nine innings this season, so the answer for 2007 is 100% of the time. But that's too small a sample to be meaningful, so I looked at all the extra-inning games the Sox played in 2006 to see if the pattern is consistent. Of the 12 such games last season, the Sox won four when they were the team that tied it, and the opponents also won four when they overcame a Sox lead, or 67%. The other four times, the Sox tied the game, but couldn't pull out the victory. This supports the momentum-shift theory, but perhaps more interesting (assuming you find any of this interesting) is the fact that not once, either last year or this year, then, did the Sox come back to win after the other team had tied the game.

That struck me as not very resilient of them, so I took a look at the results of the World Series Championship season, which I recalled as a year when the Good Guys had an incredible amount of backbone. In fact, my recollection was correct. The Sox won 10 extra-inning games after the opponent had knotted the score, including once in the World Series. Only six times that year did the team that tied it up ride the momentum to a victory -- twice by the White Sox; double that by the opponents -- or a little more than 30% of the time. That leaves three times when the Sox tied it up, but couldn't finish the other guys off. What does all this mean? Well, I doubt that the sample size is big enough to be statistically significant (I didn't run the mathematical tests necessary to find out), but it's not surprising to me that the 2005 Sox were able to bounce back 10 times after surrendering the lead, but the 2006 and 2007 editions haven't been able to do it once.

The wins since the last Update, combined with the Twins' and Indians' losses since then, have chopped the Magic Number down to 147. The Sox are in a virtual tie for third place, 1.5 games out of the Central Division lead. It's on to KC to play the last place Royals, where the Sox will hopefully beat up on the dregs of the division. Go Sox!