Japan now has had four no-hitters, including one perfect game, and two near misses (Roki Sasaki’s perfect eight-inning game and Yudai Ono’s nine perfect innings when he allowed a hit in the 10th) by the middle of June.
So what’s going on? Hotaka Yamakawa believes he knows, while the data suggests a combination of three things:
What does it mean when the announcers say your favorite team has lost x number of games after leading? Losing is never a positive outcome, and every team blows leads at some point. But what’s the norm?
So when John E. Gibson tweeted the other day about the SoftBank Hawks’ losses after leading, I was itching to figure out if it actually meant anything. Half seems likes a lot. Is it? I didn’t know.
To find out, I wrote a program to document each team’s lead or deficit in runs after every half inning since 2020. I have a few missing games from 2020, but otherwise I can say that about 40 percent of the losses in Japan come when the losing team held a lead at some point.
Continue reading Blown leads, comebacks
