Yankees Grinding Out Victories Without a Long Winning Streak

If you're a fan of the New York Yankees, you can't have too many complaints with the way your team has been playing.

The Yankees have been good at winning series, grinding out victories, limiting losing streaks. Still, it might be a bit puzzling why they haven't been able to string together a winning streak of more than five games (the Boston Red Sox had a 12-game run before the All-Star Game).

Now maybe we have too much time on our hands and we don't know why anybody would really need to know this information, but we wanted to find out how rare it would be for a division winner to go through an entire season without a single winning streak of at least six games.

Using a website called Retrosheet.org, which is a fantastic reference tool for baseball fans, we checked the game logs of every first-place team since the formation of the American League in 1901 - 302 teams. (We didn't do wild cards and we didn't bother with the National League before 1901).

What we found, after exhaustive research, is that it is extremely rare for a division winner or first-place team not to have at least one lengthy winning streak. So rare, in fact, that, according to our research, only four times has a team finished first without a winning streak of six games, which is 1.3 percent.

From 1901-68 - before the start of division play - there were 132 pennant winners and it never happened. The only team to do it from 1969-1993 - when there were two division winners in each league - was the 1972 Detroit Tigers.

Since 1995, when Bud Selig introduced the wild card, the odds have increased with three divisions in each league and it has happened three times in 66 chances (4.5 percent). Ironically, one of those teams was the 1996 New York Yankees. The others are the 1997 Seattle Mariners and the 2001 Houston Astros.

In some cases, first-place teams strung together winning streaks that reached double figures. The best was a 22-game run by the 1935 Chicago Cubs late in the season. Like individual slumps, losing and winning streaks are hard to explain scientifically. History just shows that good teams get on major rolls in which they string together a lot of victories. In the olden days, some lengthy streaks were interrupted by ties but they were not losses.

The 1996 Yankees are the only team to win a World Series without a winning streak of at least six games - their longest was five - so there is a historical precedent but statistically speaking, the 2006 Yankees will be bucking some major odds if the want to win the division without winning more than five games in a row.