Does April Matter in Baseball? You Bet Your Pennant It Does

Philadelphia manager Charlie Manuel reminded everyone that his club’s opening day loss was just one game. So did Yankees skipper Joe Girardi after dropping his own first stanza to the O’s. And at least one of Girardi’s own superstars knows full well that an auspicious start to the season can’t hold a candle to a spectacular finish.

Throw in the annual wave of rainouts, the lingering rust from Spring Training and a lack of meaningful statistics to track—Nick Markakis’ .714 batting clip and Hideki Okajima’s 27 strikeouts per nine notwithstanding—and April can feel like a month of baseball that doesn’t quite matter.

Teams with playoff aspirations, however, should note that a strong beginning to the year tends to speak volumes about who’ll be left standing at the end.

In the Wild Card era, there have been 13 seasons that featured a complete slate of April games (coming off the 1994 strike, the ’95 season did not begin until late in the month). Those years have featured a total of 104 playoff teams.

Fewer than one in five of those postseason qualifiers (20 of 104) made it to October after posting a sub-.500 April. And of the 26 World Series participants in the same span, just four hoisted pennants after a start that poor.

Fall too far behind in April, and history says you’re likely to stay there: From ’96 on, a paltry eight teams have made the playoffs after wrapping up the month more than three games below the break-even point. Angling for home-field advantage?

Only one team in the Wild Card era has earned that perk after opening the year with a losing month.

Mathematically, a slow start doesn’t bury a team any more than a midyear slump. Tigers fans certainly remember the 0-7 start that kicked off the team’s last-place ’08, but Detroit was a .500 team by mid-June, and hung around as close as five games out of first as late as Aug. 1.

That’s hardly a death sentence for the season.

But the size of the deficit accrued in a bad month isn’t the problem. Playing catch-up to earn a postseason berth puts a team at the mercy of forces beyond its control. On May 1, 2006, the Twins woke up from a 9-16 April to find themselves in a nine-game hole. On June 10, they were 11 games back.

The team went on a 30-7 (.810) rampage over the next month and a half—and picked up two and a half games to show for it. In fact, Minnesota didn’t take sole possession of first place until Oct. 1 in spite of finishing the year on a four-month, 70-33 run.

What on Earth took so long? The Twins needed the teams in front of them to lose before they could make any headway. A bad April put them in a position in which even two-thirds of a season of stellar baseball couldn’t guarantee them a Central title until Kansas City knocked off Detroit in Game 162. 

Clubs that stumble out of the gate need help to climb back into the race. If they don’t get it, they’re out of luck, no matter how well they play down the stretch.

Teams that mount a late charge to overcome a sluggish start also run the risk of draining themselves physically and emotionally just to stay alive. Of the 20 teams that made the playoffs after a losing April from ’96 on, 13 lost in the first round.

A manager can only light a fire under his squad so many times in a season before his players get burned out. The focus and intensity brought on by win-or-go-home scenarios are difficult to maintain for extended runs.

But the biggest reason teams that lose in April have a hard time winning the rest of the year is that month-long performances typically aren’t a fluke. The Tigers weren’t cooked last year because they started 0-7; they started 0-7 because they weren’t any good.

There are exceptions, but most teams don’t swing wildly from one extreme of success to the other within the course of a single season. If your record after a month says you’re nothing special, the odds are you’re not.

A hot start doesn't guarantee anything, but a cold one puts teams with championship aspirations in a bind. Would-be contenders, take note: They're all just one game, but in April, they count for plenty.