What it means for the Rangers to lose the first game of a best-of-five series at home
The Rangers might be interested in such a thing, for instance
By
Dayn Perry
•
1 min read
Since we've now dipped our toes into the Division Series round of play, it's good time to ponder the nature of the best-of-five series. It's a brief encounter, as you know, and that provides not a great margin for error. On that point, what becomes of teams like the 2016 Rangers, who lose that first game of a best-of-five postseason series at home?
Losing that opener means of course that the loser of Game 1 must necessarily win three of the next four in order to advance. That's hard, but not impossible. However, in the Rangers' case, they also frittered away home-field advantage with that Game 1 defeat.
As it turns out, history has not been kind to such teams in the playoffs. In all, 42 teams have lost Game 1 of a best-of-five series at home. Of those 42 teams, just 13 went on to win the series in question. If we assume the two teams are evenly matched, then a given team would have a 25 percent chance of winning three out of four games. In this instance, 31.0 percent of teams losing Game 1 at home went on to take the series. So that's encouraging from the Texas standpoint -- beating the in-a-vacuum probabilities of such a thing. That stands to reason as, generally speaking, the superior team tends to have home-field advantage in a best-of-five-series, so it makes sense that such a team would outplay the probabilities.
What's also of note is that in 2015 we saw two teams come back from Game 1 losses in the Division Series to win. The Royals did it at the expense of the Astros, and, coincidentally, the Blue Jays did it to the Rangers.
So as the Rangers look to reset things after their 10-1 blowout loss, they can take comfort in knowing that the task in front of them, while unlikely, is far from impossible.
