DON'T ANOINT THE RAYS JUST YET...

OUR headline might suggest to you that we aren't partial to the Tampa Bay Rays, an organization that post-neo sabe types take for granted as validation for all of their precepts (good, bad, and worse)--but nothing could be further from the truth. We are quite partial to them because in their spangled new-fangleness they also do old school things better than other, more cash-stuffed organizations. We've been doing more with less here for years, and so have they--thus as we curmudgeon our way through baseball's often feckless peregrinations, the Rays consistently produce fond thoughts.

But that doesn't mean we are going to anoint them as the slam-dunk champs of the still young 2023 season just because they've started the year out at 11-0, with a pitching staff combining for an ERA below two runs per nine innings (to be exact, 1.73 as of this morning). No, we won't do that, and neither should you (or the often-too-often numbing numberologists in the media). 

Remember the 2022 Yankees, whose hot start across all of the month of April was followed breathlessly by media hounds as if we were witnessing a new variant of the Resurrection (pardon us, but the vestige of the Easter Holiday still brings out our more blasphemous tendencies...). Until, of course, they weren't. They turned out to be just a pretty good team with one great slugger, a solid starting rotation and a great but fragile bullpen. The 2023 Yankees might be a better team, and due to the vagaries of the game, they might not win as many as the over-celebrated 2022 squad. 

But more on that later--we're here to put the Rays' blazing start into historical perspective. (That's why the pay us the big bucks to stay in the backwater and perfect our linguistic sniping even as we advocate for stricter gun control.) We took to the portals of Forman et fils (aka baseball-reference.com) to use their revamped "spam search" engine--OK, OK, span search engine, which conveniently shows us how teams with short-term performance extremes fare over the course of the full season.

And, as is often the case, we discovered some intriguing (and somewhat counterintuitive) data. That is what you see cascading down the right side of the page, and it's what we will now interpret for you. 

SO what have we got here? A paradox, perhaps, though one of small sample size--after all, it's not every day that a team starts 11-0 with a pitching staff that appears to have two Johnsons, a Koufax and a Seaver in its starting rotation. In fact, only three teams since 1913 have had such a start.

And the other two didn't win the World Series. In fact, they didn't even make it into the Fall Classic.

Yes, they won their divisions. (Oddly, though, these teams--the 1981 A's and 1982 Braves--had these hot starts in adjacent years, more grist for the "clustering theory of randomness" that our old pal Ken Adams lampoons in his email address: 2random4chance.) But they weren't hugely dominant teams.

This counterintuitive pattern persists in the next tier of hot-starting teams, the ones that began the year with a 10-1 mark. Of these teams (which, by the way, include the 1969 Cubs, who had a fall-down-go-boom September as they were lapped by those Miracle Mets), only one--the 1915 Phillies--made it into the World Series, which they promptly lost. 

This group--the 10-1 teams--has produced a shocking amount of also-ran seasons: the aggregate winning percentage for these eight teams is only .544. Only two of the eight have even made it to the post-season. 

So 11-0 and 10-1 teams have a 40% chance of making it to the post-season (4 of 10) based on the existing historical data. (Of course, when you go to Forman et fils and look up the Rays, you'll see they're given a 96% chance of making the post-season: that's because they're using a far bigger sample to calculate such odds.)

And when we look at the teams that started 9-2 with great pitching (and note that our secondary sort in these lists is by ERA...), we see a return to a more orthodox expectation: of the 36 teams in this group, 20 have made it to the post-season, 15 have made it to the World Series, and 11 have actually become the World Champs. 

Thus the data still strongly suggests that the Rays will have an excellent season--but note that none of baseball's uber-achievers (1906 Cubs, the various behemoth Yankee teams, the '75 Reds, the '85 Mets, the '01 Mariners,  the '18 Red Sox that Bill James fatuously calls "one of the greatest teams of all time," or last year's Dodgers) are on this list. They didn't manifest legendary, fetishizable properties until later on in the year. Their "proof" came via the long haul, not the heady, early daze of the dawn. 

All of this will be a distant memory in a matter of a few weeks, and will be well out of the rear-view mirror by the end of the year. The data shown above is our best guide to how things might shake out for the currently high-flying Rays, who could be a wire-to-wire wonder, or might also take a tumble off that wire like a falling Wallenda. Stay tuned...