You can't read (and I can't write) anything about the current state of the ALCS without seeing a reference to Boston coming back from a 3-0 deficit in the '04 CS, and a 3-1 deficit last year. I thought I'd take a look at what the odds were of those comebacks happening, and how that compares to this year.
2004 ALCS
From Covers, here are the lines from G4-G7 of the series:
After they lost 19-8 in Game 3, the Red Sox had a 4.9% chance of winning the series. Of course, this doesn't really do the comeback justice, as they were a lot lower than 47.9% to win G4 when The Great Mariano came in for the 9th, with the Yankees leading 4-3.
Looking at Tango's win expectancy table, the home team has a 19.4% chance of winning when they're down one after 8.5 innings. Since it was Rivera against Boston's 7-8-9 hitters, we'll knock that down to 15% for our purposes. At that point, the Red Sox had a 1.5% chance of winning the series. It was quite a comeback; you may have heard.
2007 ALCS
As you can see, their chances were much better here. They "only" had to win three games, and were favored in each of them. According to these odds, we would expected the Red Sox to come back in this scenario 18.1% of the time. And that's as low as we can go, as they never trailed in G5.
Combining the two series, there was a 0.88% (1 in 114) chance the Red Sox would win all seven of the necessary games. If you look at '04 ALCS G4 when Rivera came in, there was a 0.28% chance (1 in 363) Boston would win that game and the next six.
2008 ALCS
This year falls somewhere in between. The series odds at Matchbook are currently -620/+540, which would indicate a 15.4% chance of the Red Sox coming back. They're significant favorites in G5 (-150/+142), with Matsuzaka going against Kazmir, but the two games in Tampa would be much tougher. The series line is probably a little off because of their prior comebacks, and the fact that they're the Red Sox; I'd say there's about a 13% chance that they win three straight.
Original Story:
http://vegaswatch.net/2008/10/what-ar...
