Idiots Write About Sports

Here’s a little post-Bay Bridge Series fun fact. On the afternoon of June 16, the Oakland Athletics completed a three-game sweep of the Seattle Mariners with a 9-6 victory at the Coliseum. That same afternoon, the San Francisco Giants were putting an 8-2 hurting on the Arizona Diamondbacks to take two of three games from the hated Snakes.

That was the last time, as of this writing, that both Bay Area teams enjoyed the taste of victory on the same day.

The A’s, of course, followed up the Seattle series with another three-game sweep of the Los Angeles Dodgers. But the Giants failed to take advantage of the A’s fine work, coughing up three consecutive games to the Mariners up in Seattle. The A’s hit the road, dropping their first two games in Colorado, just as the Giants were taking two from the Fullerton Angels of Costa Mesa. But then the A’s salvaged the final game of the Rockies series on the same day the Giants finally succumbed to the team from San Juan Capistrano or thereabouts. And of course, with their next three games against each other, it was impossible for the A’s and the Giants to win on the same day — at least, not until Bud Selig announces the “Everybody Wins Wednesdays” promotion that he’s undoubtedly hatching at this very momentt.

So the question is, how long will this spate of one-sided victory continue? And the more daunting question: what is the longest stetch of games in which the franchises in a two-team market have failed to win on the same day? (We consider Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and the Bay Area to be two-team markets. We will also extend the definition to include Baltimore-Washington, though adding the Missouri, Texas, and Ohio teams to the mix seems like a bit of a stretch.) I have no idea how I would go about tracking down such a meaningless-but-nevertheless-interesting-to-me statistic, so if anyone’s got any ideas, I’m all ears. Better yet, if you know the answer, lay it on us and save me the work of having to research it myself.

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