With Opening Day fast approaching, we thought we'd ask the question,

"Is a fast start important to a team's postseason hopes?"

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To find out, I entered the records through April for every postseason team since 1996, and the records through May for the postseason teams of 1995 (that season didn't start until late April, due to the players' strike). I also noted where they stood in relation to first place, and their records at the end of the season.

So before we get into some gritty details, let's first answer the question ... No, a fast start is not particularly important. Of the 64 teams in the study, 31 were in first place at the end of the season's first month ... which means, of course, that 33 were not in first place.

On the other hand, 53 of the 64 teams were at .500 or better after that first month, which does tell us something. Being in first place isn't so important, because you can't control how well your competition plays; maybe they just had a great month, which certainly can happen to almost any team. However, you can control how well you play. And if you're a good team, you're probably going to play at least moderately well in just about every month.

In fact, postseason teams play almost exactly as well in April as they play all season long. These 64 postseason teams won 58.8 percent of their regular-season games ... and 58.5 percent of their games in the first month.

Are there exceptions? Sure. The most extreme example is the 2001 Oakland Athletics. At the end of April, they were just 8-17, which left them a full dozen games behind the first-place Seattle Mariners (who are the most extreme team going the other way, as the M's started the season 20-5 on their way to 116 wins). But from that point, the A's went 94-43 and captured the wild card with 17 games to spare.

Other sub-.500 teams include the 1995 Dodgers (14-19), the 1995 Yankees (14-19), the 2000 Giants (10-13), and ... wait for it ... the 2002 Angels (11-14).

Yes, your 2002 world champions were just 11-14 as May dawned, and stood six-and-a-half games behind the first-place Mariners. Perhaps it's also worth noting that in both 2001 (12-14) and 2002 (12-15), the Atlanta Braves got off to sub-.500 starts. So while the Braves enter the season as underdogs in the National League East (at least according to this scribe), don't write them off if they get off to a slow start. Because while the first month of the season certainly tells us something, the next five months tell us a whole lot more.

Senior writer Rob Neyer, whose Big Book of Baseball Lineups will be published in April by Fireside, appears here regularly during the season. His e-mail address is rob.neyer@dig.com.