Shannon here. Dan wrote this one (two wins ago) and I had planned to hold it until after the Subway Series, because I try to match the headspace of the readership, and it didn’t make sense to me to write a Doom & Gloom article after back to back shutouts and into the Subway Series.
Then, this crossed my newswire from the WSJ
Since 1996, just 9% of teams with a losing record on June 1 wound up with 90 wins, the number teams usually shoot for to make the playoffs, according to data crunched by The Wall Street Journal and Ben Alamar, founder of the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports. During that early season period, the average correlation between a team’s win percentage on June 1 and its final winning percentage is 0.76. Statisticians consider that to be a very high correlation
I think that’s an article very well worth reading….and since the WSJ opened the can of worms, I might as well let Dan ruin your day. Here’s Dan…
At this point even the most optimistic Mets fan would probably have to admit that the likelihood of a playoff spot this year is somewhat unlikely. Me being a numbers guy wanted to know just how unlikely, so let’s look at the math.
Looking at data over the last 15 seasons (1996 was the first full season with the wild card), the Mets have had an average record of 20-19 through May 17th. This year through May17th they are 19-22 – or 10% below their average.
Over the remaining games of the season they have averaged a 62-60 record, essentially the same rate as games through May 17th. If that pattern held true this year the Mets would finish with a 75-87 record.
But wait Dan, they’ve underperformed so far, surely they are better than a .500 team. Challenge accepted.
Let’s look at only those seasons where the Mets were below .500 as of May 17th and see how they did the rest of the way. There were 5 such seasons (96,01,03,04, and 10). Collectively in those years the Mets averaged 17-23 up to this point. And you know what? They weren’t as bad as that record would indicate. The rest of the season they had an average improvement of 7%! Of course that’s really not that much, and they still averaged under .500 ball the rest of the way. (For the record that 7% avg. improvement was heavily driven by the 2001 team)
So what of this team. Well, if we assume that this team will also show a 7% improvement for the rest of the season, they would finish the year at 79-83