8 Years Later

Here's the same chart as the one from yesterday, with the playoff odds for the NL East this year, instead of from 2007.  It's funny, eight years ago I had to make the chart myself by copy and pasting data from BP into an excel spreadsheetl; these days it's all done for you already.  You can download a JPEG with a single click.

What a time to be alive!

At this point, the Mets and Nats chances of making the playoffs are basically mirror images of each other.  It's pretty unlikely that either one of these teams gets a Wildcard spot, and the other three teams in the division are basically totally out of it.

I Don't Know If Anybody Else Remembers . . .

. . . this, but it's obvious what the choice should have been. Hey hey hey.



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Sorry I Have Not Been Posting

It Is Time To Face Facts

The Mets are not going to make the playoffs.  Especially not with season-thus-far MVP Ryan Church getting another concussion.  I can't wait to see more of Marlon and Endy.

Coincidentally, the pic above also accurately depicts how I feel right now.

Surely Some Revelation Is At Hand

Tommy Glavine put the finishing touches* on the Mets historic collapse in the last game of 2007 with one of the most spectacularly bad starts of his long career, giving up seven earned runs in only a third of an inning. In a way, I can almost respect that. I mean, if you’re going to blow a seven-game lead with only 17 games left to play, you may as well finish it in the most magnificently horrible way possible.

But that begs the question, how did the Mets even end up in the position of having their entire season depend on the sulky Glavine? An easy (and popular) answer is that Guillermo Mota did it. And granted, Mota was terrible all year. But really, perpetrating a baseball crime this heinous is too great a task for any one man, no matter how hittable his fastball.

Some of the guys over at Baseball Prospectus who are way smarter than I am have a simulation that they used to estimate each team’s chances of making the playoffs based on current standings, the expected win percentage over the remaining games, and . . . I don’t know, logarithms and shit. The actual method isn’t important. Anyway, they figured that, at their highest, the Mets had a 99.8% chance to make the playoffs, behind only the 1995 Angels as the team most likely to make the playoffs but which ultimately failed to do so.

Those are 500-to-1 odds against. In order to miss out on the playoffs, the Mets would need to run into a perfect storm of bad luck, poor performance, and hot competition in order to complete the choke. Of course, that’s why they call ‘em the Amazin’s.

The Starters

On Monday, September 17th, the Mets woke up with a 3.5 game lead and an estimated 99% chance of making the playoffs, despite having just been swept by the Phillies . . . again.** Over the remaining two weeks of the season, the Mets would get just three quality starts, and only manage to win two of those, going 5-9 overall. For the last 14 games of the season, the Mets averaged less than five innings per start. That’s terrible. But it just completed a disturbing trend that’d been developing all year. Take a look at this:



In the NL this year, starting pitchers accounted for 64% of batters faced, or a little less than two thirds (I will admit to using BFP, or Batters Faced by Pitcher, rather than Innings Pitched, simply because it was easier for me to find a month-by-month breakdown, and I am a very lazy man). Translate that into a game, and that’s six innings for the starter, and three innings for the bullpen. As the season went on, though, the Mets bullpen was being asked to carry a progressively heavier and heavier load; culminating in a two-week period where they averaged four innings per game, and as many as five, five and a third, or ultimately eight and two-thirds innings a game. That’s too much.

The more innings that have to be pitched by the bullpen, the more a manager has to rely on the Guillermo Motas and Aaron Seles of the world; and Mota and Sele are terrible. This sets up a vicious cycle where relievers may have to come into a game early and without sufficient rest, then pitch badly because they are tired, only to be replaced by an even worse reliever who pitches badly because he is also overworked, and so on, and so on; until Billy Wagner openly complains about how badly you manage your bullpen and you just wish Flanders was dead.

It looks like a small difference, but during this stretch the Mets bullpen was pitching 20% more than NL average.

Bad Luck

Some commenter here on MetsGeek (I wish I could remember who) wrote during this bleak two-week stretch that it looked to him like the Mets were the victims of an unusually high number of bleeders, dying quails, dinks and dunks; and wondered what the Mets BABIP was (Batting Average on Balls In Play). Well, here you go:

The average BABIP in the NL for 2007 was .304 for starting pitchers, and .298 for relievers. Anything much different than about .300 is probably the result of luck. It looks like a lot of the starting pitchers’ woes were due to just that – bad luck. The Mets starters actually had pretty good peripherals during this time, too: 9.5 K/9, 3.4 BB/9, and 1.2 HR/9. So you wouldn’t expect them to have gotten as shellacked as they did. Sadly, this was just a regression to the mean from the ridiculously good BABIP the Mets posted in the first half.

The Schedule

This is also a bit of bad luck. The Mets were scheduled to play 16 games over the final 17 days of the season. A rescheduled rainout from June 28th against the Cardinals meant that the Mets would have to play 17 straight, without a single day off. Where’s Crash when you need him? The lack of a day off, combined with starters who couldn’t go past the fifth inning and Billy Wagner’s back spasms, meant that by the time the Mets got to the last week, the bullpen was reeling. Many people (me included) criticized Willie Randolph for using sub-par relievers like Mota and Schoeneweis in important game situations, but the truth is that he had to run somebody out there. L’il Pedro and Heilman couldn’t pitch every inning. Now, would a single day off have turned these Mets back into a 97-win team? Probably not. But it might have made the difference in a game or two, and two games would have given the Mets the division.

The Competition

Finally, for this historical collapse to be complete, three other teams all had to play well. Obviously the Phillies kept the pressure on by going 9-4 in the final two weeks of the season, and hats off to them (jerks). They played well when it counted. But they were still only one game better than the Mets. If they had played out their final 13 games closer to their established winning percentage of .540, the Mets could still have taken the division. Likewise, if either the Rockies or the Padres had played only a little bit worse, then the Mets could have ended up in the playoffs as the Wildcard. If the Rockies had “only,” won 11 of their last 14, instead of 13-of-14, the Mets would have played the Diamondbacks in the first round of the playoffs. If you look at three teams over a given period you can usually expect at least one of them to be less than awesome.

The End

There was a reason why the Mets still had an estimated 99% chance to make the playoffs with only two weeks to play – so many highly unlikely things would all have to happen for the Mets to miss out on the playoffs entirely. Not only would the Mets have to play badly (and unluckily) over 129 innings in just 14 days, but the Phillies would have to play well, the Rockies would have to play ridiculously well, and the Padres would have to bend but not break. What are the odds that all of those things would happen? One in a hundred? Well, there you go. I don’t think that the 2007 Mets were a deeply flawed team, or one that had a single, glaring weakness. If any one of these things had gone just a little bit differently, the Mets could still have made the postseason. Rather, it was the accumulation of small, unlikely events that combined to kill the Mets season. It was like being nibbled to death by mice.

At work the following Monday morning on October 1st, my friend Tom from Philadelphia came by my office to gloat/tempt me to kick him in the throat, and I’ll close with what I told him then. Yes, the Phillies won the division; and yes, the Mets missed out on the playoffs by collapsing in historic fashion to the jeers of the nation. But it’s not like the Phillies were such a shit-hot team – they won 89 games. Really, it isn’t so much that the Phillies won the division, as that the Mets lost it. Like, if I drop $20 on the ground and Tom picks it up, it’s not like he has a new job. He didn’t earn that 20 bucks; I just got careless. Next time, hopefully, maybe I won’t be so careless.



Thanks to Baseball Prospectus, David Pinto’s Baseball Musings, and Baseball-Reference.com for making my inaccurate and uninformative ramblings possible.


*This nightmare of a game represented the last of the partial season tickets I got with some buddies. As we were splitting up games after the All-Star break, I remember thinking that the Mets would have the division sewn up by then and would be resting guys for the playoffs, so it’d be a meaningless game; probably played by minor leaguers. Man, those were good times.

** I was at this game, too. Clearly, I need to go to fewer games.

World Series Odds

Here they are, updated:

Wow, it really looked like Boston was cooked there, didn't it? Also, what happened, on a day that nobody played, that caused Boston and Colorado's chances to flip-flop like that? Answer: the Red Sox dropped Wakefield from the postseason roster and replaced him with LHP Jon Lester. Apparently the Rockies are vulnerable vulnerable to lefties.

Playoff Odds

I've talked before about how fascinated I am by this, but that magnificent bastard Clay Davenport's done it again, this time for the playoffs. Here are Clay's estimated chances for each team to win the World Series.

Wow. God's own Rockies, the current favorite to win the World Series. Who'da thunk it? Of course, these odds don't really mean anything. These playoff odds are all log5's and math and stuff, not baseball. If you don't buy into any of that, these odds may as well be pulled straight out of Davenport's ass -- you may recall a certain NL East leader who had a 99.8% chance of making the playoffs, but somehow managed to blow it.

You can't really tell from this graph, but the combined chances of the two NL teams only add up to 48.9%. The two AL teams combine for 51.1% (they add up to 100% -- I checked!) which means I guess that we think the AL representatives are stronger than the NL reps. Which I guess shouldn't come as a surprise, given what we know about the relative strengths of the leagues.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank both the Rockies and the Phillies. Phillies, your shoddy play in the NLDS helped us all forget about the Mets historical collapse. Thank you. And Rockies, your amazing 20-of-the-last-21 run is doing the same. Good work. Remember, nothing in September ever happened. Shhhh.

Two More Like That, Please

Yes, Chase. I like your hat very much. See if you can get another just like it today.

One third of the way to closing the door on the NL East. Keep it up, Rockies. Also, my Spanish is terrible.

Go Rockies!

While the past three weeks for the Mets were a gag-job of the highest order (well, second highest), we're only going to hear about it for the rest of our god damn lives if the Phillies make some noise in the playoffs. Specifically, I will never hear the end of this if the Phillies end up playing in -- not even necessarily winning, but even just playing in -- the World Series.

If the Phillies get beat by the Rockies, the collapse of the 2007 Mets will be one of those "hey, remember when this happened?" interest stories, but we won't need to hear about it every fucking year. But if the Phillies make it past the Kid Rocks, and win the NLCS to play in the World Series, the Mets won't live it down for 50 years.

See, the most famous collapse of all time culminated in Bobby Thompson's "Shot Hear 'Round the World," when the Giants came back from a 13.5 game defecit to beat the Dodgers for the NL pennant. What most people forget is that the Giants went on to lose the World Series to the Yankees in six games. This was back in the day when there weren't three rounds of playoffs; the team with the best record in each league went straight to the World Series.

What makes it famous, and why people still talk about it 56 years later is that there was a lot on the line -- a trip to the Series. Mathematically a greater collapse (greatest of all time, according to these guys) was the Angels in 1995. But nobody ever talks about it because the two teams to whom the Angels lost a potential playoff spot, the Yanks* and Mariners, ended up losing in the playoffs before they could get to the Series.

So, go Rockies! The sooner the Phillies are out of the playoffs, the sooner we can all start to pretend the last three weeks never happened.**



*1995 Wildcard

**Just like the 2002 AFC Championship Game, which never fucking happened. You get me, chief?

Postseason Odds = 0%

Postseason Odds Report

I love this god damn thing. I've been torturing myself by consulting the Mets plummeting odds of making the playoffs every day for the last few weeks. Anyway, here's the Mets season, graphically presented, since April 10th.

On the off chance that you read this and you don't know what I'm talking about (hi honey), this clever chap over at Baseball Prospectus has looked at the current standings each day, and then calculated the odds of each team making the postseason by simulating all of the remaining games for each team a million times, and recording the number of times out of that million each team would make the playoffs, either by winning their division or the Wild Card.

Since peaking at a 99.8% chance of making the playoffs on September 14th -- that's right, just two weeks ago -- the Mets chances of making the postseason have taken a nose dive. On the other hand, they do still have almost a 60% chance of getting making it. It's 50-50 at this point whether the Mets or Phillies will win the NL East, but there's a small -- around 9% -- chance that the Mets could lose the division to the Phillies but still take the Wild Card.

Little Help Here, Guys

Go Nats!













Go Brewers!













And LETS GO, METS!!

NL Central

I was hanging out recently at my favorite bar, Schittzen Giggles, wondering who's going to win the division in the NL Central. Milwaukee and the Chicago Cubs are tied up at 71-68, with St. Louis only a game back at 69-68. Man, the NL Central is a crapfest. Winning this division is like winning the retard spelling bee, or being the world's strongest midget.

Anyway, consulting the ol' BP Playoff Odds Report, it looks like the Cubbies have a slight edge over the Brewers, with Milwaukee predicted to win the division 37% of the time to Chicago's 44%. They've got the same record, why is Chicago 7% more likely to make the playoffs (we all know nobody from the Central is winning the Wild Card)? St. Louis, by the way, still has an outside shot at 17%.

The answer, of course, is the strength of their remaining schedules:

Cubs: .454
Milwaukee: .481
St. Louis: .492

The difference in the strength of each team's remaining schedule is largely accounted for by the fact that, of the three NL Central contenders, only St. Louis has games remaining against both of the others. The Cubs have five games against the Cards, but none against the Brewers; while the Brewers have three against the Cards as well. The Cubs and Brewers basically get to beat up on Cincy, Pittsburg and Florida for the rest of the season, with the exception that the Brewers will play three against the Braves (which is why their remaining schedule is .481 instead of a cakewalk .454).

Of course, the flip side of this is that St. Louis controls their own destiny more than Milwaukee or Chicago. I honestly have no idea who's going to take this division. I guess it'd make my 91 year-old grandpa happy if the Cubs did. On the other hand, if the Cubs actually won a World Series, it would probably kill him. The last time the Cubs were world champions was eight years before he was born.