SO the Los Angeles Dodgers had that white-hot month: 24-5...a feat already fading into a crevasse with the shocking news of Julio Urias' arrest for domestic violence. It's a safe bet that Los Dodgers will not be duplicating their feat (.828 WPCT) in September.
But it leads to a question we've never seen pursued elsewhere: just how often do teams have such high-flying months? Let's set the bar for high-atmosphere flying at a WPCT of .800 or higher. Just how often do you think that teams manage to sustain such a performance level over any given calendar month? And has anyone actually sustained such a level over two consecutive months?
That's a total of 53 times over that span, and we have some color-coding here that adds a more detail:
--An orange-shaded box shows you where teams had two consecutive .800+ WPCT months. (The two teams in question: the 1906 Cubs and the 1912 Giants. Oddly, both lost the World Series that year.)
--A green-shaded box shows you the years in which the New York Yankees had such a month. (That's right, they haven't done it since 1941.)
--Blue-shaded boxes show you baseball's expansion years, which somewhat surprisingly were not collection points for high-flying monthly performances. 1977 was the only expansion year in which teams flew up and over the monthly .800 WPCT barrier--and one of them was the Dodgers, doing so in a league where there were no expansion clubs ('77 was AL expansion only).
--When you see a number in red type, it's a high-flying month where the team's ERA was 3.00 or higher. And when you see a number in bold red type, it's because both teams who flew high did so with a 3.00+ ERA.
Note that more of these months occurred in pre-expansion times: 33 in sixty years (1901-60). In the sixty-three seasons since, it's happened only 20 times.
On this chart, we show you the post-season status of the high-flying team:
--Those with boxes around their team abbreviations were World Series winners.
--Those whose team abbreviations are shown in red are teams that failed to make the World Series.
--Those teams with abbreviations in orange didn't play in the World Series because the World Series hadn't been invented yet!
Because of the ever-increasing amount of post-season play, it's become harder and harder for teams with high-flying months to actually win the World Series. In fact, in the past sixty-one years (1961-2022 minus 1994...) it's happened only once: the 1984 Detroit Tigers. Only five of the eighteen teams who've completed a full season and had a chance to make it the World Series have done so (we can't add in the 2023 Dodgers and Braves, whose season isn't over yet).
Oh, and forget about that extra shading on the 2013 Rays...just another friendly goof!
NOTE that the Dodgers have had high-flying months in consecutive years (2022 and 2023). Only the 1912-13 Giants, the 1938-39 Yankees, and the 1942-44 Cards have managed that. And only those Cardinals have managed to have three consecutive years in which one of their monthly WPCTs exceeded .800. Small solace to those St. Looie fans enduring a dismal year in '23, perhaps, but we should never look askance at a singular achievement.
The accompanying stats are geared around pitching performance. (Getting the hitter data is a more arduous task, but we'll dip into it when some of our other obligations are less obbligato.) Note that the highest ERA for a high-flying team occurred in 1950 (the Boston Red Sox). Only one other team has had a team ERA over 4.00 and had an .800+ WPCT in a month--the Milwaukee Brewers, in April 1987. Fittingly, neither of these teams made the post-season.
We'll be back with a look at high-flying performances in 29-game spans not strictly tethered to the calendar (in other words, 29-games spans that cross over monthly boundaries). There are lot more of those to sift through, so brace yourselves...
