MLB Standings by Run Differential: Look out for the Mariners and Marlins

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 21^st.  (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).