In 2009, the Yankees won 15 games in their last at bat. That’s a lot of games that could’ve gone either way, but because of a few things, they went the Yankees’ way. A lot of it is the fact that the 2009 Yankees were an incredible hitting team and that allowed them to rarely feel like they were completely out of the game. Of course, luck was also a factor. When the game is so close that it must go down to the last at bat or extra innings, a team will almost always be lucky to win. How lucky were the 2009 Yankees when it came to walking off in 2010?
HUGE DISCLAIMER: I DID NOT DO VERY WELL IN STATS 101 MY SENIOR YEAR OF COLLEGE SO SOME OF THIS MATH MAY BE A LITTLE FUZZY. IF ANYONE OUT THERE WANTS/NEEDS TO CORRECT MY MATH IN THE COMMENTS, PLEASE DO SO.
To try and figure this out, I went to the Yankees’ pages on Baseball Reference and looked at the last ten years results data. The Yankees had the following number(s) of walk off wins in the given years:
2009: 15
2008: 9
2007: 6
2006: 3
2005: 10
2004: 7
2003: 5
2002: 7
2001: 3
2000: 6
That’s a total of 71 walk off wins in the last ten years, so the average is 7.1 walk off wins per year. To see if the Yankees got a little lucky in 2009, I also calculated the standard deviation of this set of data. That came out to be about 3.4. According to the Empirical Rule, 99.7% of data lies within 3 standard deviations of the mean (average).
So, to see years in which the Yankees got lucky (or unlucky) let’s multiply our SD, 3.4, by three (10.2) and add it to our mean, 7.1.
7.1 + (3.4*3)= 17.30
What this tells us is that anything higher than 17.3 walk off wins would be a ridiculous outlier. It would seem, then, that the Yankees’ 15 walk off wins, no matter how gaudy and outlandish looking it was, were not too much of a statistical outlier.
Still, this sample is still relatively small, so I’m not sure exactly how reliable it is. Not only am I only using one team and not comparing these numbers to the broader league average, but the team has changed so much since 2000 that the teams are completely incomparable.
Going forward, this half-assed study doesn’t have any real predictive value, but it was fun to just crunch some numbers and remind myself of how awesome the Yankees were in walk-off situations last season. So, I leave you with a video of the two walk offs for which I was in attendance:
April 16th vs. Twins
July 20th vs. Baltmore
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5 Responses to Can All Those Walk Offs Tell Us Anything?
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TIQ IQ
Two minor comments. You include 2009 in your raw data which is incorrect because it skews the data towards the point you want. Second a strong argument can be made that anything above 2 standard deviations (i.e. 95%) represents an outlier.
Removing the 2009 number gives you a raw total of 56 walk offs and a mean of 6.22 with a standard deviation of 2.26 meaning anything over 10.74 walkoffs is really an outlier (and 3 standard deviations would be 13 walkoffs).
What does this mean for the 2009 team going into 2010? Absolutely nothing, except make you appreciate how awsome 2009 was.
Anyways, your piece does put the unprecedented numbers of walkoffs in context and watching the videos makes me smile.
What it means is; the Yankees are one hell of a hitting team and doesn’t give up just because they are behind!
I also think that it has to do with the bullpen in the case of the extra inning games.
Matt, nice choices of games, I happened to be in attendance at both of those games too!
Nice!
Before that A-Rod AB vs. the Twins, I said to my girlfriend “Watch him hit it over that sign in left.” I was almost right.
Joe, why remove 2009? You should analyze all your data, and that includes 2009, as well as 2001 and 2006. Actually, if you assume that this should be normal distribution (that’s where 95%/99% rule comes from), full set of data works very nicely: in normal distribution you’d expect slightly less than one third of the results (32%) to lay outside 1 standard deviation, and around 5% of the results to lay outside 2 standard deviations. With mean of 7.1 and SD of 3.4, intervals are (3.7, 10.5) and (0.3, 13.9). 3 results are outside 1 SD (as expected) and 1 is between 2 and 3 SD (I would expect 0 or 1). It works.
Of course, the number of data points is small, and talent level has fluctuated wildly during the period, so we can’t assume normal distribution, but ignoring that, there is 2 to 1 probability that Yankees will have between 4 and 10 walk-offs this year.