As the
Memorial Day weekend approaches, most MLB teams have played a little over forty
games, or roughly a quarter of the season.
We’re still twenty or thirty games away from getting some clear meaning
from both individual statistics and team statistics, but I thought it might be interesting
to look at what the standings would look like if we just focused on run
differential instead of wins and losses.
Ideally, the Pythagorean projections should be applied to a larger
sample, like the entire season, but we can get a small glimpse of what might
unfold in the 120 games or so left to go.
Here are the American League
Standings as of Wednesday, May 21st.
(Ignore the yellow that ESPN highlights my favorite teams with).
So, in that wonderful exercise
all sports fans love to play, If the Season Ended Today: the Orioles, Tigers, and A’s would all be
division winners with the Angels, Yankees, Blue Jays, and possibly the Twins
duking it out in the wild card (I include 4 WC teams because all teams haven’t
played the same number of games, but are all within 0.5 games of each other).
But now let’s look at the
standings based on run differential. In
the AL East, the Blue Jays are actually the only team with a positive run
differential, so they would win the division.
In the Central, the Tigers remain division winners, as does Oakland in
the West. But, the wild cards would be
the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim California on the West Coast of the United
States of America and the Seattle Mariners.
Go Mariners. Boo, no Yankees.
On to the National League where
the standings look like this:
Based on win / loss records, the
Braves, Brewers, and Giants would all be division winners, with Rockies,
Nationals, Cardinals, and Dodgers all within 0.5 games and vying for the wild
card.
But the National League is even
more intriguing than the AL when you look at run differential. In this scenario, the Miami Marlins win the
East, the Cardinals win the Central, and the Rockies win the West. The wild card would come down to the Braves
and the Giants.
So, keep an eye on the Marlins
and Rockies, as that could be fun, and reserve your skepticism for the Brewers
and even the Nationals.
(Just a FYI note here: the Cardinals
have underperformed their Pythagorean projections for two years running and are
doing it again. Could this mean Matheny
stinks even worse that you think as a manager?
A column for another day).
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