Indians Comeback!
After being down 10-1 after the first inning, the Indians pulled off the comeback of the year to win the game 15-13 in extra innings. This is one of the craziest win probability graphs I’ve seen this season.
It even bests the August 9th comeback last season, when the Indians overcame a 5 run deficit by scoring 11 runs in the top of the 9th.
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David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.



IT’S THE ROYALS, ALSO KNOWN AS A TRIPLE A TEAM, WHO CARES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
When I heard about this game I had to check out the graph. What was the lowpoint for the Indians (Minimum Win Probability) ? Is this the biggest comeback of the year? I wonder how it compares to that time they had that great comeback vs. the Mariners. I think that was in 2001, tho. I’m guessing 10 run deficits might be off the win probability charts, literally, tho.
In the 9th inning the Royals had a 99.4% chance of winning the game. When they were up by 9 in the 1st, they had a 98.1% chance of winning.
This WAS the biggest away team comeback of the season. I looked at games where the home team’s average Win Probability for the entire game was less than the away team’s and the home team lost.
On average, the Royals had a 79.8% chance of winning this game. The next biggest away team comeback of the season was on 5/20 when the Mets played the Yankees. The Mets had 72.5% chance on average to win the game. Last night’s game was the biggest comeback by an away team from 2002-2006.
The biggest comeback of the season, using the same critera as above would be when Adam Dunn hit his walk off grand slam on 6/30 at home.
This is actually a pretty good topic for an entire article….
wouldn’t the biggest comeback of the year be the 11 run deficit the yankees over came against the rangers on may 16th?
Yeah, that Clevland-Mariners comeback game was August 5, 2001, and it was the first thing I thought of as well. It was the difference between Seattle tying the AL 116 win record and setting a 117 win record that year. The Indians came back from being down 12-0 in the 3rd and 14-2 in the 6th. But by the time their comeback got going most of the significant Mariners position players (Ichiro, etc) had been substituted; so while beating a bunch of scrubs and benchwarmers in that game is similar to beating the Royals in this one, the difference is that the Indians managed to get themselves in a 10-1 hole against the Royals in the first place — that’s the improbabability.
http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/B08050CLE2001.htm