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Padres have best winning percentage and the lowest attendance on Wednesdays

If a Padre poops in the woods and there's no one there to smell it...

Christopher Hanewinckel-US PRESSWIRE

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:

Day Wins Games Winning %
Saturday 501 1109 45.176%
Friday 511 1131 45.181%
Sunday 543 1175 46.213%
Thursday 351 752 46.676%
Monday 340 725 46.897%
Tuesday 498 1054 47.249%
Wednesday 501 1058 47.353%

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.

Day Average Attendance
Saturday 29,381
Friday 24,564
Sunday 24,348
Monday 21,134
Thursday 20,973
Tuesday 19,956
Wednesday 19,631

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:

Day Wins Games Winning %
Sunday 276 582 47.42%
Friday 270 556 48.56%
Saturday 264 539 48.98%
Thursday 195 393 49.62%
Monday 183 363 50.41%
Tuesday 274 530 51.70%
Wednesday 284 541 52.50%

And here's the average home attendance:

Day Average Attendance
Saturday 30,207
Friday 24,147
Sunday 21,957
Monday 20,233
Thursday 18,904
Tuesday 18,304
Wednesday 17,899

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:

Day Wins Games Winning %
Saturday 237 570 41.58%
Friday 241 575 41.91%
Wednesday 217 517 41.97%
Tuesday 224 524 42.75%
Monday 157 362 43.37%
Thursday 156 359 43.45%
Sunday 267 593 45.03%

And here's the average attendance on the road:

Day Average Attendance
Saturday 28,601
Sunday 26,695
Friday 24,967
Thursday 23,239
Monday 22,037
Tuesday 21,627
Wednesday 21,443

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