Free Pedro

I loved this game (boxscore here). It featured a walkoff, a brawl, a blown save, five lead changes, a six-run inning by the losing team, and, of course, the picture to the right. You lack a baseball soul if  that doesn’t make you smile. Who doesn’t like seeing A-Rod take it in the face, and who better to give it to him than the epitome of all that is good, Tek? Unfortunately, this game was not as significant as the Boston fans celebrating its anniversary today, seem to be making it out to be.

People like to point out that the Sox went 20-3 starting on August 10 that year, a stretch that put the Red Sox in the playoffs in a year in which they’d in the World Series for the first time in, well, a while. They seem to think that this game was the catalyst. Setting aside the fact that there were 16 days between this win and the very good stretch of baseball that the sox played in mid-to-late August, the truth is that we overstate how impressive that type of stretch is. I’ll spare you all the math–feel free to email me if you want to see it and have an interest in learning a little about binomial distributions–but the chance of a team with a .605 winning percentage having a 20-3 run at somepoint in a season is a little over 36%. Consider further that, with the trades they had made and whatnot, the team was better than a .605 team at that point, and it becomes even more likely that they’d have an .869 stretch over 23 games. Still, I think this was one of the few games in a baseball season that can have a real long-term impact.

Mariano Rivera has been calling the Red Sox his daddy for some time now. While Rivera is successful in his save attempts over 90% of the time versus the rest of the leage, he’s successful about 79% of the time versus the Red Sox. More than 20% of his blown saves have come against the Sox, far more than against any other team. This data is not an abberation, the stats suggest (at over a 99% confidence interval) that the Sox are in Mariano’s head. The Sox turn him from the closer with the second highest career save percentage of all time into Byung Hyun Kim (no joke). Do I think that a dramatic walk-off in a penant race can put the Sox in his head? Yes, I do. Dave Roberts helped, too.

This win was not the catalyst that put the Sox into the playoffs. It didn’t make them any more likely to win the Series in ‘04. So celebrate July 24, 2004 because it was a fantastic game on its own merit. That, and because Mariano now trembles at Fenway.