baseball stoopidstats -- 2017 edition, number 2

Sometimes I have wondered about what has been the most prevalent win/loss record in Major League Baseball. Fortunately, with access to the historical records I can figure it out.

But, before looking at it, what do I expect? A couple thoughts I had before looking at the actual numbers:

• In aggregate, teams have a .500 record -- exactly as many wins as losses. That's obvious. I would expect that the distribution of winning percentages to be something akin to a normal curve centered at .500.
• The season has been 162 games long since 1961 for the American League and 1962 for the National League. It had been 154 games long for most of the 20th century before that. So we had the shorter season for longer. But, with expansion, there have been more teams since 1961. So it's very clear that more 162-game seasons have been played than any other number.*

Given those facts together, I would expect to see more records of 81-81 than anything else.

And I would be wrong.The most prevalent record is 86-76. That is a 162-game season, so I was right on that count. But that's a record that could plausibly get a team into the playoffs, so I am very surprised by that. Teams have finished the season at 86-76 forty-seven times. For the record, 81-81 has occured thirty-five times, putting it in 11th place. Go figure.

There are 590 different records that have occurred once and only once. I am not going to list them in this post, but you can see them in the file, which is here.

Another couple of interesting facts:

• The 28 most prevalent results all consisted of 162 games.
• The most prevalent result with other-than 162 games was 75-79, which occurred twenty-one times.
• With 2865 seasons played, there have been 911 different win/loss records.

*After writing that sentence I checked. There have been 1,167 162-game seasons played. There have been 504 154-game seasons. In third are 153-game seasons, which represent teams that had 154-game schedules with one rainout.