And, what makes it worse - he's more unlucky too.
Meet Stephen Krupin. He and his father have been loyal (!) Nationals season ticket holders since the inaugural season in 2005. Krupin managed to make it to 19 home games this season. The significance? The Nationals lost all 19 of the games. ALL 19 OF THE GAMES.
Yes, the Nationals suck. We know. Still, they went 33-48 at home this season. Krupin asked one of his genius baseball buddies to do the math on the odds of this occurring. The result was a staggering 1 in 131,204. Here's the e-mail he sent to Dan Steinberg of the D.C. Sports Blog:
I figured that even with the worst team in the bigs, this 0-19 record couldn't have been an easy task. So I asked my cousin--a Ph.D. who works as an economist at the Department of Labor and moonlights as a statistics analyst/columnist on ESPN.com and Baseball Prospectus--to crunch some numbers. He and his mathematician friends figured out that the odds of my going 0-19 this year at Nats Park were 1 in 131,204.
His explanation follows:
It took into account that they were 33-48 at home this year, made up of 0-19 when you were there and 33-29 when you were not there. The odds that you would select 19 games out of 81, of which 33 would have been wins, and you picked none, that was the shocker. The other discussion is whether it was just 1 in 20,000, which would be the odds of going to 19 games of a team that wins 33/81 of their games in general, and seeing no wins. But we eventually decided that what was more impressive was that the team actually went 33-29 when you weren't there, and you just picked the wrong games.
The Nats were clearly the team most likely to foil a season ticket holder like that, but I guess so were the Royals, who apparently also went 33-48 at home. My co-workers pointed out that you might have been going mostly to games against particularly good teams; like, you wanted to see the Red Sox orDodgers or something, which obviously would make it more likely, but still really impossible.
[NOTE: I didn't. Outside of seeing the first two Red Sox games in the middle of the week, I almost always picked games based on my schedule].
It's gonna be a long time before you break back to .500. I'm wondering if you were the fan in baseball with the worst record of anybody in games attended. If it's 1 in 130,000, and each team gets a couple million fans on average, you might be the only one who attended at least 19 games and failed to see a win.
His last point is a good one. Of all regular attendees (19 or more games) around the country, fewer were probably frequent customers at terrible teams' games. It's much easier to understand why someone would go to one out of every four games at Fenway than at Nats Park. So I got that going for me, which is nice.
I was going to go last Tuesday to try and make it an even 0-20, but called a late audible for the U2 concert. Good thing, as the Nats beat the Mets that night.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go buy a lottery ticket. Or whatever the opposite of playing the lottery is.
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