A September To Forget
September is usually a lot of fun, with pennant races heating up and teams fighting for every last win in an effort to grab a playoff spot. This year, though, it looks like we’re in for a fairly boring month.
According to Coolstandings, the Yankees are 95.8% favorites to win the AL East. Even if the Red Sox manage to run them down, New York is still likely to win the wild card. There is basically no chance that the Yankees miss the playoffs. They’re just playing out the string at this point.
Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Los Angeles are in the same position, essentially. All three NL division leaders have 95% or better odds of winning their divisions. Colorado tried to make the west interesting, but without a miracle, it was too little, too late. Even the two division races where one team isn’t a near lock still have the potential to be decided in the first part of the month. The Angels recent skid has put them at only 76.5% likely to win the AL West, but a strong week could end that race pretty quickly.
Likewise, the Tigers are 74% likely to win the AL Central, but with a 4.5 game lead on the Twins, this one could be over soon if Minnesota falters.
The only real race in baseball is the NL wild card chase, as Colorado and San Francisco are just a single game apart. That should be fun to watch, but one playoff chase left on September 3rd? That’s not cool.
This has been a fun season, but it looks like its going to end with a whimper unless one of these seemingly impenetrable forces falls apart in the next few weeks.
6
Colarado did go on that crazy streak a few years ago (22 out of 23 or whatever it was) so the races ain’t over ’til they’re over. You never know in baseball.
And, the odds look decent that the NL West and NL Wildcard will merge into the same race, if they aren’t already, basically killing two races with one wildcard.
Yay!
Not all hope is lost in the AL:
.958*.765*.74 = .5423.
P(division leader changing in AL) = .4577.
Almost a coin flip that someone gets passed in the AL. If you want to look at a glass is half full number crunch.
And this is what’s wrong with baseball, and precisely the thing that no one wants to fix. The haves continue to have, and the have nots shall not and won’t.
This comment is rather confusing. My best guess is that you mean that the teams leading their respective divisions have led them most of the season and beyond and thus we keep seeing the same faces in the playoffs.
Assuming this is what you meant, I’m not sure that really holds water – The Phillies and Tigers were just pretty terrible in the 90′s. The Rays and Rockies have never done anything until the past two years. The AL West has had a pretty decent rotation of winners. Also the Braves went from absolute “haves” to somewhere in between “have” and “have not” recently while Baltimore is trending strongly to the “haves”. Also, some “have not” teams like the Royals have done little to dislodge themselves from their rut and really have no one else to blame but themselves.
Nah, it’s much more fun to blame the Yankees and their “Z0MG $200M!!!111!!1!” payroll…
I’d like to add that every decade there were “haves” and “have nots.” The Royals, Pirates, Indians, Braves, Rangers, Senators, Rays, etc, etc, etc went through extended periods of sucktitude, and they didn’t get better until their front offices got better.
please stop…..
Looks like someone needs to get their honker out of a spreadsheet and watch a few games.
Steroids aint killing the game. It’s the killjoys on steroids that are killing the game.
what?
I want some of whatever drugs you’re on!
AL Wild Card race?
Wondering that myself. Boston’s newfound paucity of SP depth could make things interesting after all. Although Texas keeps finding ways to get key personnel injured.
As for epic collapses, the Mets managed to toss away a 7 game lead half way into September. Which of the current teams most resembles the Mets? If I had to bet on an improbable collapse I’d go with the Dodgers.
I noticed this a week or two ago. I have never been a wildcard fan, so I went ahead and quickly reconfigured for the old 4 division setup, but basically found that there would still be only one pennant race. However, that would not really increase the number of pennant races (though as you mention, things have actually tightened up a bit in the last week).
The closest races would be LA-Texas, LA-Colorado, and St. Louis-Philadelphia. I guess the most interesting aspect is that the third would be much more fun to watch than the current SF-Colorado race, in that a pennant race between two good teams is better than one between two mediocre teams. Of course, the schedule would also be balanced differently in this scenario, so we can’t actually know what would happen.
Short story: it’s bad luck that we don’t have more pennant/wild card contenders this year.
Is it luck or is it a symptom of an offseason where very few teams had any payroll flexibility. I was surprised at the number of teams that left themselves open to major depth issues while talented players like Bobby Abreu sat around and waited to be called. The Angels, Red Sox (with that pitching depth they recently cut), and Dodgers took advantage of that depressed market. Meanwhile the Yankees did their thing and the Phillies made a couple upgrades with their World Series war chest.
Teams that spent money and flopped include the Cubs and Mets (who focused way too much on their bullpen and not enough on their glaring rotation issue and complete dearth of depth). I suppose the Braves could be added to this list, but they’ve performed exactly as I and most others expected.
I don’t know how to do the math, but I suspect that it would be quite feasible to calculate in an average year how many pennant races we would expect to see and how close they would be. In fact, is there a “Submit your question” button here on FanGraphs? I’d love to see an analysis of it.
As for this year not having races be predictable, I very strongly disagree. My impression is that years in which free agents are undercompensated tend to be more competitive, not less (see collusion, which coincided with the worst stretch in Yankee history). Small market teams are more likely to get their hands on some players (Tampa, Oakland, Washington, and others all signed guys who in other years could have gone to bigger clubs). I think that just as individual games hinge on luck, the number of pennant races this year basically came down to that factor. A few guys underperform, a few others overperform, a few injuries, and suddenly you see teams like the Yankees pull way ahead of Tampa Bay.
Two mediocre teams? BtB’s Power Rankings have the Rockies as the best team in the NL. The Cardinals are in the middle of the pack with the Giants.
So, maybe you mean Phillies and Rockies.
so SF and COL isn’t fun to watch because…..you don’t bother to watch them?
Playing for HFA may not be sexy, but it is still very important and teams would be crazy not to fight for the best overall record or atleast HFA in the first round.
vr, Xei
So maybe we need more wildcard (is wildcard like cowbell?) Let the two teams with the best (non-division-winning) record have a three-game series that decides who moves on to play the team with the best record in the league. It would push the post-season out a few days, but it would make things a little more interesting (and there would be no sure thing for the second team in a strong division — ie, it won’t be enough for Boston to finish ahead of Texas; they’ll have to play them to advance). It would also screw up the starting rotation for the wild card winner, making the road to the LCS a little more difficult.
(Yeah, I know, this has been proposed before. And the postseason is long enough as it is. And the team with the best record might “go cold” waiting for the wild-card outcome, or might have its rotation messed up in turn by having its series with the wild card winner extend beyond the finish of the other inter-divisional series. Yeah.)
Not a fan. But those one-game playoffs in recent years have been pretty cool. They essentially boil down to “who has the best/best-rested ace pitcher?” I like that. After all, we watch baseball to see dudes like Randy Johnson, not dudes like Bob Wolcott.
Yeah, that Padres-Rockies game was probably one of the best games I’ve seen in a long time.
I like the idea. It seems unfair that a divisional winner essentially has no advantage of a wild card winner. The wild card winner should be put at more of a disadvantage. If they add another wild card team and make the two duke it out in a three game series in three days at the home of the team with the best record and then force the winner to play the next day in the home of a divisional winner. Then, cut out some of the superfluous off days during the next two rounds and the whole thing won’t take any longer than it currently does.
Maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but I kind of expect the AL West to get more interesting with so many games left between Tex and LAA.
Also, given the unbalanced schedule, and it sometimes seems to be HUGELY so, why do people feel the need to give an advantage to division winners and/or penalize wild card teams?