Gaslamp Ballmanac: Let's go Streaking

I thought I'd revisit the Gaslamp Ballmanac Series by slicing and dicing some data with a really dull tool, my mind! I took a closer look at the Padres winning and losing streaks using data from Baseball-Reference.

First let's look at the number and length of winning streaks that the Padres have claimed in their history.

Winning Streaks

To clarify, the 14 game winning streak is made up of a 13 game streak, a 12 game streak, etc. It's all one streak! The next longest streak is 11 games. Since there are 3 occurrences, that means there were two streaks that ended at 11 games and one that was part of the 14 game streak. Hopefully that makes sense.

Maybe I should have only counted the streak when it ended, but it's too late for that now.

Let's move on and depress ourselves by looking at the losing streaks.

Losing Streaks

A 13 game losing streak sounds miserable. Thankfully I don't remember it. I do however remember that awful 2010 ten game losing streak. It still makes me so angry how after every game a player or coach would talk about how they weren't worried. "Maybe you get worried!" I'd yell at the TV or radio. Ugh. The 2010 Padres really sh_t the bed down the stretch. You know what's weird though? If it weren't for the 10 game streak, the team's next longest losing streak was only 3 games which would have been a new team record.

I was quizzing Dex today to see if he could guess the shortest of the longest losing streaks in a season. He guessed correctly, because he's a baseball expert. It's four. It was done twice. Once in 1998 and once in 2007. I'll always remember 2007 as the team that should have been good but wasn't. I was miserable back then.

In 1998 the Padres were successful in avoiding a big losing streak. In fact they also had the longest winning streak in franchise history at the time, which was 11. That's how you get to the World Series apparently, with the shortest losing streak and the longest winning streak. However, we learned you can't win the World Series with a 4 game losing streak.

Here's a table of the longest winning and losing streaks for each season. Savor it.

Longest Streaks by Year

Here's the same table sorted by the length of streak. As you can see there's been 5 years where the longest winning streak the Padres could put together was 4 games.

Longest Streaks by Length of Streak