OR…Does Rust Never Sleep?

OR…Is it better to burn out than to fade away? (Now watch me pull this rabbit out of my hat!)

As promised, I will now take a look at how clinching a division or league title either very early or very late affects a team's prospects for the playoffs. Do teams that clinch earlier have an advantage in the playoffs and World Series? Does the extra time to rest one's starting players and set one's rotation give a team an advantage when the playoffs roll around or does it make the team rusty?

But before we can examine those issues we need to define what we need by clinching late and clinching early. I took all of the division and league winners, calculated the number of games remaining after they clinched their title, and then divided them into three groups, the early, late, and average clinchers. The early clinchers had 8 games or more remaining when they nabbed their title (120 teams). Late clinchers had three or fewer games remaining (130 teams). The ones in between fell into the average rubric (97 teams).

Now that we have our groups, let's see what they look like. What are their stats on average:

No big surprises here. Teams that clinch earlier have better records (whether you look at their average winning percentage or the percentage of games that were won…po-tA-to, po-tat-o) and are more games ahead (GA) of their next best opponent. But it is surprising that the overall average is much better than the late clinchers as a group and slightly better than the average clicher.

Next let's look at the raw numbers for division/league titles, World Series won, number of teams, and percentage of teams that won a World Series:

Clinch Type	#Tms	Won Div?	Won Lg?	Won WS?	%
Early	120	53	87	40	33%
Avg	97	47	69	30	31%
Late	131	62	87	31	24%
Overall	348	162	243	101	29%

It looks like average clinchers have ended up winning the Series at almost the same rate as early clinchers. Of course, late clinchers win a bit less frequently.

Finally, let's look at what teams do after they clinch. I summed the number of regular-season and post-season games won and lost for each group. Here are the results:

You can see that teams win much less frequently after they clinch a title than before they clinched. This seems like human nature. Also, the dropoffs get considerably worse the later a team clinchers. Early clinchers winning percentage after clinching is just 69 points worse than their overall winning percentage. Average clinchers have a 100-point difference, and late clinchers, 131.

So early clinchers are the best teams, they continually to be the best teams after they clinch as well. Does that mean that they have the best winning percentage in the postseason as well? Ah, no.

The average clinchers are actually slightly better (.524 to .521), and late clinchers lag far behind (.454). So what does it all mean?

It seems that the rust never sleeps theory does apply. Too much idle time even for seemingly a better population of teams based on the overall and the post-clinching winning percentage is a bad thing when it comes to the postseason.

It also means that those teams that are in dogfights until the last weekend of the season are at a distinct disadvantage in the postseason.

But I guess it does make sense if you consider a few things. Teams that have some time to rest starting players and set their rotation (average clinchers) have an advantage over those that just squeak into the postseason. However, too much time starts to become a disadvantage apparently because the added rest and lineup/rotation setting is minimal after a certain point and the rust factor, i.e., playing long stretches of games that no longer really matter starts to wear on a team at least ever so slightly. And that's even as those teams are continuing to win, which is the odd part. I guess the fact that all teams naturally decline slightly after clinching, even though the early clinchers decline the least, they do have the longest period in decline.

Neil Young was not only prescient when it comes to grunge and post-grunge rock (though that vocoder never took off), he knew his postseason baseball as well. Hey Hey, My My!