Welcome to The Opener, where every weekday morning you’ll get a fresh, topical column to start your day from one of SI.com’s MLB writers.
A 19-game losing streak is astonishingly unlikely.
Even for a bad team—a very bad team—it requires a marriage of bad timing and bad luck that is all but unbelievable. It feels inscrutable. For a losing streak this long, there are no logical, satisfying answers. It cannot be adequately explained by something like the weaknesses of the pitching staff; it asks for something more esoteric, more ambiguous, like a cursed feral cat running through the outfield on a warm night.