In part one of what will be a concerted effort today to pretend that this didn't happen, I thought I'd take a very quick look at something I mentioned in yesterday's recap: average margin of victory.

Just to quickly sum up, I found that during Monday and Tuesday's games that the winning team scored an average of 7.22 runs, while the losing squad put up 1.74 runs, for an average winning margin of 5.48 runs. That seemed pretty darn huge to me, and it got me wondering about what the average margins had been over the last few years. Thankfully, Retrosheet exists, and with a little manipulation of their yearly game log files, the answers came fairly easily.

Year	Avg Winning Score	Avg Losing Score	Avg Margin
2000	6.96	3.32	3.64
2001	6.56	2.99	3.57
2002	6.37	2.86	3.51
2003	6.51	2.95	3.56
2004	6.59	3.04	3.55
2000-04	6.60	3.03	3.57

While I expected the average margins to be lower than what we saw in those twenty-three games I looked at, the difference isn't nearly as large as I thought it would be. My surprise comes mostly with the average winning score and how that impacts the victory margin - a whopping (to me, at least) 3.57 over the last five seasons.

I thought we'd be looking at an average margin somewhere in the mid-twos, but obviously, it's much higher. If I get some time I might take a look at how this era compares to seasons long past (unless someone's done it already, in which case, feel free to mention where to find it - I'm looking at this for kicks and because the Cubs got creamed yesterday, not for scholarly purposes, and I'd hate to simply be rehashing already completed work), because my guess is that it's historically high.