Do the Yankees Predict the Economy?

Is it possible that the Yankees regular season performance is a predictor for the DJIA? I agree that the thought alone seems absurd. How, and why, would the Yankees regular season performance have any effect on something as complex as our economy? I in fact started out this little experiment to argue with a recent blog post I read (http://zerobetablog.com/2007/05/21/divergence_on_t/). The article ties loosely the Yankees and Mets performance to some psychological underpin in the New York area that resulted in quantifiable changes in the Dow and Real GDP. The author, Justin Paterno, even remains skeptical about his findings throughout the article. I took Justin's work one step farther and decided to take a look at how the Yankee's win/lose record compared against the next days performance of the Dow. I expected that for every day that the Yankees won and had a better record the Dow would perform better. My original prediction could not have been more wrong.
The graph above charts every Yankees win/loss above .500 against the Dow's performance for the next session. For example a score of 12 on the Y axis would mean that game put them 12 games over .500. The X axis is the Dow's close for the next session. Fri. and Sat. games were not included as data points since the markets were closed the next day. The games were still counted when figuring record above and below five hundred. For example if the Yankees had won Fri. and Sun. and had previously been 4 games over five hundred the next data point would be (6, Dow's Session Close). There is a decently strong negative linear correlation in this graph. In contrast to what i had previously thought the more the Yankees won the worse the Dow had performed.

I decided this needed a little more research so I went and dug out the Yankees 2007 schedule and mapped it against the Dow the same way I did for 2008. There was no correlation whatsoever. This phenomenom may be a coincidence or the Yankees are only good at preidcting bear markets. I can't say im sold on either. With all this kept in mind I feel that the best thing for the current economy is for the Yankees to not make the playoffs.