Padres have best winning percentage and the lowest attendance on Wednesdays

I've been wondering for the last several months if there's a particular day of the week that the Padres play better than others. If you want the best chance of seeing a Padres win, which day of the week should you attend?

In the first entry in the Gaslamp Ballmanac series we will answer such questions. You'll be able to reference this series of posts to find Padres information as it relates to the seasons, the weather, the phases of the moon, harvesting crops, etc.

Answering this question wasn't simple. The problem was I couldn't find a way to query the data. Yesterday I broke down and spent three hours converting all the Padres' season data into a comma separated files on Baseball Reference and then importing them into a database table so that I could write my own queries.

Here are my findings that are sorted in ascending order by winning percentage:

As you can see the Padres have the best winning percentage on Wednesdays. Interestingly they lose most often on Saturdays, Fridays and Sundays. That seems crazy to me because those are the games that usually have the highest attendance.

Now, let's look at the average attendance for each day of the week rounded to the nearest person.

Notice anything? The days of the week are in the same order except Monday and Thursday are flip flopped. There seems to be a direct correlation between fan attendance and winning percentage. You'd expect that the Padres would play better in front of larger crowds and win more but it's the complete opposite. The Padres win more often when the attendance is smaller and lose more often when the attendance is larger.

We can only conclude that the Padres are shy and suffer from stage fright. They probably can't even pee when at a trough urinal. Or maybe they like people to watch them lose? What other answers are there?

If you truly want the Padres to win, don't attend games!

UPDATE:

I became curious about home and away splits, so here's the winning percentage when the Padres play at home. It's pretty similar to the overall outcome. They lose the most over the weekend and win mid-week.

Home:

And here's the average home attendance:

Again there seems to be a pretty close correlation between the winning percentage and the attendance. DON'T GO TO GAMES!

On the road it's quite a bit different. They play much better on Sundays and much worse on Wednesdays.

Away:

And here's the average attendance on the road:

I'm fascinated by this and I can tell you are too. More to come...