The worst World Series is past, and now we turn towards the future….
October results
Unsurprisingly, the failure for the team to make the post-season in consecutive years, for the first time since 2002, put a bit of a damper on fan confidence. I’d be hard pushed to call it a September collapse, considering the team went 13-13 in the final month. But it was, agonizingly, not quite good enough, and they lost the final spot on the tie-breakers. Finishing with five more wins in the regular season than in 2023, is certainly nothing to be sneezed at. However, after the pennant-winning post-season run in 2023, that feels more like a moral victory (though Arizona did better than the AL pennant winners in Texas!). Here are the results, taken a couple of days after the most extreme of eliminations.
- 0% – 1 (not confident in the slightest)
- 5% – 2
- 3% – 3
- 3% – 4
- 12% – 5
- 34% – 6
- 24% – 7
- 13% – 8
- 5% – 9 (very, very, VERY confident)
While there was nobody at the VERY bottom of the scale, nine percent did come in at the bottom third, after back-to-back months where there was nobody less than a “4”. Likely more significantly, there was a collapse at the top, with “8” and “9” being cut to less than half, dropping from 44% at the beginning of September, to just 18% a month later. That said, the “6” and “7” categories held up fairly well, and that limited the damage to the overall average rating. That still went down by more than a point, from 7.37 to 6.16, the lowest figure for a month since the beginning of July, though still one and a quarter points above the figure at that point.
Below, you can see the breakdown for the past 12 polls’ results, followed by the line graph showing the trends over this and previous seasons.
November poll
Obviously, not going to be anything like as dramatic a poll as last year, where it came on the heels of the D-backs run to the World Series, resulting in an unexpected surge in confidence, of more than a point and a half. Indeed, there has really been very little to move the needle since the last time, so I would not expect a great deal of movement here. Arizona had to sit on the sidelines and watch as the Dodgers finally won a World Series that did not deserve an asterisk. Annoying, wasn’t it? The team, and its fans, has basically been twiddling its thumbs, waiting for things to start up again. And now, they can! Has there been any chance in your confidence watching the LA triumph?
That would be what the poll is for. As ever, feel free to explain your choice in the comments, especially if it has changed from the previous one.