Inquiring minds want to know.
As the designated Saturday Recapper for the Snake Pit, I’ll admit, I’ve been thinking about this for awhile. I hadn’t actually gone and looked up our weekend records before now—I had a vague but growing conviction that we’ve been playing really bad weekend ball, but after writing yet another “hey, come see if we can salvage a series win/split the series/avoid the sweep” paragraph in the Saturday afternoon recap, I decided to examine more closely. And, as will be shocking I expect to no one, I found that I was right.
Going into this morning’s avoid-the-sweep effort against Cincinnati, we are sporting a scruffy if not totally unconscionable 31-33 record. According to my very precise and careful research (basically, looking at our schedule on the Diamondbacks official site and making hatch marks on a steno pad, with a pen, while being several beers into my evening), I find that our record on Friday nights seems to be 3-7 (sorry, AZ), and 2-8 on Saturdays (sorry, me). So of our 33 losses thus far, nearly half of them have come to kick off various weekends. If one includes the Sunday losses (we are 7-3 in those contests, at least, so yay for most of the guest recappers), we’re at 18 losses on the weekends, which brings us to more than half of our total losses on the year.
Now, I know that You Cannot Predict Baseball (TM), and weird clumps of outcomes happen all the time in all sorts of places where statistics tend to accumulate, so it’s likely just so much noise. But nevertheless, I will pose you all a question, dear Diamondbacks fans and baseball friends. In fact, I already did so in the title to this completely random and unsanctioned post.
Why do we suck so much on the weekend?
Any vague theories, half-baked conjectures, or absolutely and unquestionably definitive answers, however metrics-heavy or utterly frivolous, would be welcome at this point.
So would any suggestions about positive affirmations, offerings to Jobu, possible sacrifices, or other measures that that might rectify this situation and change our weekend destiny going forward. I know that I would love to recap a win one of these Saturdays, and I’m sure that AZ wouldn’t mind having another win to recap some Friday this year.
So please, share your thinking, and any ideas you hay have. If there’s math involved, of course, you know the drill: make sure to show your work.