To paraphrase Rene Descartes, “I lose, therefore I am.” Early in the season, losing baseball teams like to claim that there are still a lot of games left to play, that the big turnaround is coming. In truth, by the time a month of the season has passed, the vast majority of teams have already laid their cards on the table: What they are is what they will be.

We might say of a ne’er-do-well 26-year-old son that he has yet to “find” himself. But a team that has played 26 games and has a record of 11-15 – the Yankees’ mark after last night’s win over the sad-sack Tampa Bay Devil Rays – can make no such excuse. Research by Baseball Prospectus’s Rany Jazayerli has shown that April isn’t just spring, it’s destiny. As the number of games played mounts from 20 (roughly 12% of the season) to 30 (roughly 19%), a sudden change in fortunes becomes increasingly unlikely.

When the Yankees played their 20th game of the season on April 26, they boosted their record to 9-11. In the years Jazayerli surveyed, from 1930-99, 211 teams kicked off the season with a 9-11 record. Just 76 of them, or 36%, turned their seasons around and finished with a winning record. Most were a little worse than that, posting a .482 winning percentage during the remainder of the season, equivalent to a 78-84 record over a full season. Just 11 of those teams, or 5.2%, made it to the postseason – as did the 2004 Yankees, who started 9-11 and rebounded to win 101 games.

Since the advent of the Wild Card in 1995, 72 teams have gone 10-15 or worse during the first 25 games. Only nine of them (12.5%) made it back to .500 by season’s end, and just one team (the 2001 Oakland A’s) made the playoffs.

At 30 games, a mere four days away for the Yankees, the picture becomes even more stark. Say the Yankees win their next four games against the Devil Rays and the A’s – not impossible; lots of teams go to Tampa Bay to get well – to even their record at 15-15. Of the teams in Jazayerli’s survey, 160 attained this record, and just about all of them hovered around the .500 mark for the rest of the season. Just under half of them posted winning records. Fourteen of them, or 8.8%, went on to the postseason.

If the Yankees do not manage to even their record over the next several days, history predicts a cold summer in the Bronx. Even accruing an even 2-2 record in the coming days would offer little in the way of hope: Teams with a 13-17 record after 30 games played .473 baseball over the remainder of the season. Just three of those teams, a scant 2.2%, made the postseason.

The Yankees do have one thing going for them that most of the teams in the historical survey do not: The Bombers have won 305 games over the last three years. Even if a few players decline – and it looks as if Jason Giambi, Tom Gordon, and Bernie Williams have all aged precipitously – it would be very unusual for a team to fall away from such a solid foundation in just one season (though the Yankees have done it before, notably in 1959, 1965, and 1982).But the sample of teams studied shows that even established winners face long odds to rebound when shackled with a slow start. Taking the team’s track record into account, the Yankees still should not be given more than a 10% chance of making the postseason.

Still, there are always exceptions. The 2002 Anaheim Angels started the season at 6-14. No team in Jazayerli’s survey reached the playoffs after such a poor start; the Angels won the World Series. The aforementioned 2001 A’s stumbled out of the gate with a 8-18 record; they finished 102-60, good enough to win the American League wild card.

Conversely, some teams that have started strongly have suffered abrupt collapses. The 1995 Phillies began the season at 22-8. Curt Schilling hit the disabled list for good in July, and suddenly the best pitcher on the team was Paul Quantrill. A spectacular nosedive ensued and the team finished with a losing record.

If this year’s early stragglers – not just the Yankees, but the Indians, Padres, and Phillies – want to hope for a miracle, they just might get one. But each loss takes on more predictive power, and optimism can morph into denial in a hurry.

Denial is actually an understandable response given the Yankees’ track record. The last time the Yankees finished the month of April with a losing record was in 1991 (although they went 13-17 in April and May combined during the strike-shortened 1995 season). After more than a decade of success, the Yankee fan can be forgiven for grasping at straws: A key trade will be made, a hitter will get fitted for contact lenses, a pitcher will realize he’s better off standing on the left side of the rubber, and suddenly new life is breathed into the team.

Barring a sudden turnaround, there will be a lot of talk out of the Yankees’ camp during the next several weeks about how they haven’t played up to their potential. On Sunday, Gary Sheffield told Jennifer Royle of YES that, “it’s going to come together … Eventually it’s going to all come together.”

That’s not quite true. The Yankees are their record. As the Beatles sang, there is nowhere you can be that isn’t where you were meant to be.

Mr. Goldman writes for Baseball Prospectus. For more stateof-the-art content, visit www.baseballprospecuts.com.