[Insert Witty Title Here]

I’ve been preparing a post on the Pirates’ win records over the last few years and I had created an Excel spreadsheet to plot their win fraction (total wins/total games played) as a function of time during each season. Initially, I had plotted their win fraction versus the date but that made comparing the data between seasons complicated because the seasons’ start and end dates vary a bit from year to year. So, I plotted it versus the number of games played. When I did that, I was somewhat surprised to find that there were sections of the plots from different seasons that overlapped exactly, sometimes for 5 or more games. This indicated that these plots were constrained to consist of a series of small sections from a relatively small, finite set of curves. However, I didn’t know what these curves were, so I set about to figure it out. The final product of this investigation is graph paper that a sports fan can use to easily plot the progress of his/her favorite team as the season progresses.

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