Tom Tango's piece isn't really that long. but basically, he looks at in game momentum in baseball. he find a bunch of games to answer 2 questions
1. "I looked for every single game in the last 50 (years I think) that a home team came back from at least five runs down to tie the game and end the inning. This means that, starting the top half of the following inning, we've got two teams tied, each with an equal number of outs to go, except the home team now has the momentum. What happened? How often did the team with the momentum win the game?"
2. "Let's repeat, but this time with the road team having the momentum. Note that entering the bottom half of the inning means that the home team has three extra outs for the game. So, we should expect to see lower win numbers for the road team"
he finds that the effect of having the momentum is statistically insignificant...but there is a tiny lift. but people vastly, vastly, overrate it.
"Momentum exists. But we'll be hard-pressed to find it in anything other than in-game scenarios. We can barely find it with the numbers in even the most dramatic come-from-behind games."
btw, this is
Tom Tango
the 2nd link was just an extract from an academic study in the Journal of Sport Behavior
"Actual winning and losing streaks for the 28 major league baseball teams and the 29 National Basketball Association teams were compared to streaks that would have occurred under the assumption that game outcome is independent of the outcome of the most recent previous games."
basically, they are trying to validate the assumption that whether or not you win or lost the previous game has no bearing on if you win or lose the next game.
their result is the same as Tango's
"The results suggest that sports participants and observers place an unjustified importance on momentum as a causal factor in outcomes of sport contests."
the extract suggests that what you do next game is independent of what you did last game
a 3rd example:
this Wall Street Journal article finds that "there was no affect on postseason play coming from team momentum at the end of the (baseball) regular season. "