Crunching numbers

Forget all the other stats and chew on this: 19 in a row

A lot of people around baseball will tell you that statistics are for losers. You spend too much time looking at the small print, they say, you get too wrapped up in ERAs and OPS, you go overboard with your Rotisserie league and all of a sudden you miss how pretty a 6-4-3 double play can be.

It's easy to do. With baseball, numbers just kind of flow, naturally. Like Niagara. Earned runs times nine divided by the number of innings pitched. Hits divided by at-bats. These formulas, these familiar statistics, make up the universal language of baseball. They are part of it.

Sometimes, though, the simplest numbers turn out to be the best ones. Like, for instance, the number of wins. Or the number of wins in a row.

The Oakland A's have won 19 consecutive games. It takes no multiplication or division to figure that out. There is no arcane formula for this particular statistic.

The A's, simply, have won every game they've played the past 19 times they've played. They haven't lost since four Mondays ago.

It boggles the mind. It does not compute.

"We're doing something pretty special," Oakland's Eric Chavez told reporters the other day. "We've been good the last couple years. But this is borderline spectacular."

Borderline spectacular? No one has won this many games in a row in 55 years. Rickey Henderson, who's been in baseball forever, wasn't born when a team last won 19 in a row. The oldest manager in baseball, 67-year-old Frank Robinson of the Expos, was just a 12-year-old kid.

This may not be a once-in-a-lifetime thing. But it's pretty darn close.

"This," outfielder David Justice told reporters, "is just exciting."

We are swamped by amazing feats in baseball, and the numbers that go with them, every day. Alfonso Soriano, already the only second baseman in baseball history to steal 30 bases and hit 30 homers in a season, is gunning for a 40-40 year.

The Seattle Mariners won 116 games last season. Florida's Luis Castillo hit in 35 conecutive games earlier this season. Seattle's Mike Cameron smacked four homers in a game, then L.A.'s Shawn Green did it, too.

The Yankees' Bernie Williams knocked 11 straight hits and Manny Ramirez of the Red Sox reached base in 16 straight plate appearances. San Francisco's Barry Bonds, who set a pretty significant record last season, will break his own record for walks in a season this year and is on the way to setting a new single-season record for on-base percentage.

Mark Twain once said, "Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable."

Well, this is a fact: No team had won 19 consecutive games since the 1947 Yankees -- that's a lot of teams in a lot of years -- until the A's came back to win No. 19 on Monday.

There are all sorts of statistics that show how impressive the A's have been since their last loss on Aug. 12. They're hitting .294. They have a 2.37 ERA. Opponents are hitting just .211 during the streak. Oakland's starting pitchers have been credited with 15 of the 19 wins.

You know what you get out of those stats? Yeah, that the A's are pretty good. Statistics just don't do this streak justice. They can't.

What's important is that the A's -- because they're good and they're lucky and because, once every lifetime or so, the planets line up and the schedule works out and the ball bounces just right and everybody stays healthy and everyone is happy and everyone believes in the team and a whole lot of other reasons that are, statistically speaking, so much mumbo-jumbo -- have won 19 straight games.

"It's fairy tale-like, the way things are going," first baseman Scott Hatteberg told reporters Monday. "We're in an area that's uncharted."

This is something to savor. It's an opportunity to push away from the box scores, put down the calculator and just watch. You want a statistic to sum it up, a number to put it all in perspective? Try this: Oakland's winning percentage, over the past 19 games, is 1.000.

As any statistics freak will tell you, it doesn't get any better than that.

John Donovan is a senior writer for CNNSI.com. Comments? To e-mail Donovan, click here.

 

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