Early Winning Streak Doesn’t Always Lead to Pennant : Baseball: But a hot opening gives team a positive push for the long season.

What do fast starts mean--great finishes or great flops?

Both, according to baseball history.

The Cincinnati Reds are the 11th team to start a season with at least nine straight victories. Of the previous 10, five finished in first place and two of them, the 1984 Detroit Tigers and 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers, wound up winning the World Series.

“You know you’re going to lose sooner or later, but it’s a positive influence,” Detroit’s Alan Trammell said. “It gives a contagiousness that it’ll be a good season. There is a carry-over for the rest of the year.”

Then there were the 1987 Milwaukee Brewers. They tied a major league record by winning their first 13, then lost the next 12. The Brewers finished third in the American League East.

“It was bad pitching. Any time you go into a slump, it is because of bad pitching,” Milwaukee relief ace Dan Plesac recalled. “Good pitching overshadows all of everything else.”

So how much will it mean to the Reds, who lost Sunday to Atlanta after going 9-0?

“What it does is send out a strong signal that they’re loaded,” Tigers manager Sparky Anderson said. “It does a lot of good things. It says that Lou (Piniella) is a pretty good manager, that Cincinnati has a very good club, and that he is handling it well.”

Cautioned Trammell: “They’d better enjoy this while they can. It’s too early to say if this is their year.

“Baseball is such a long season, I don’t care who you are, you’re going to have a bad stretch too. The important thing is to keep those stretches short. I don’t think it puts any extra pressure on the other teams. You know nobody’s going to go undefeated. But these games are just as important as the ones you win in September.”

The Reds’ longest winning streak since 1975 helped them take an early three-game lead over Los Angeles.

“It’s only 10 games into the season. It’s good to be on top, but there’s still 152 to play,” said Reds shortstop Barry Larkin, who leads the majors with a .512 batting average. “A 10-game winning streak isn’t going to win the pennant for you.”

Well, it might. Atlanta started the 1982 season with 13 straight victories and won the National League West on the final day when San Francisco beat Los Angeles, eliminating the Dodgers.

“Getting off like that, that’s what won it for us because we only won by one game and later we lost 19 out of 21,” Atlanta’s Dale Murphy said. “You feel like you can’t lose.”

Bill Russell, now a coach for the Dodgers, remembers how Los Angeles chased the Braves the entire 1982 season.

“I’m sure it was a big confidence builder for Atlanta, to win 13 in a row. You don’t have to win them in September,” Russell said. “But because of the consistency we played with and the fact that Atlanta was up and down and didn’t play with that much consistency, we never thought we were out of it until the last day of the season.”

The Oakland Athletics won their first 11 in strike-split 1981 and won the AL West. The next year, the Chicago White Sox and then-Manager Tony La Russa opened with eight straight victories but finished third at 87-75.

In 1955, the Dodgers started the season with 10 victories and went on to bring the only World Series championship to Brooklyn.

The 1962 Pittsburgh Pirates and 1966 Cleveland Indians started the season with 10 victories, but Pittsburgh wound up fourth and the Indians came in fifth at 81-81.

The 1944 St. Louis Browns, 1918 New York Giants, 1940 Brooklyn Dodgers and 1984 Tigers each won their first nine games. The Browns won their only AL pennant, while the Giants and Dodgers both finished second.

That 1984 Tigers team was one of the few that managed to stay hot. They raced to a 35-5 start and eventually ran away with the AL East.