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About a week and a half ago, a gem of an edition of the Joe Sheehan Newsletter landed in my inbox. Joe’s topic du jour was the Mets, whose hot start he had dismissed somewhat ruthlessly back in April, and whose fans had pushed back pretty hard. (The Mets had fallen back to .500 at the time of the piece, and they’re back there again now.) Joe didn’t confine himself to the Mets alone, though. His thesis, a favorite of his (and—by no coincidence—mine), was that we tend to underestimate the degree of fluctuation in performance teams and players can experience, even over significant chunks of a season. A snip:

I've been accused of the Gambler's Fallacy, over and over again, and I don't buy it, because baseball teams are not dice and baseball games are not independent trials. Baseball teams do play better sometimes and play worse sometimes; that those stretches are not predictable at all doesn't make them any less real. The Phillies scored 19 runs in ten games, then lit up the Cardinals for nine, the Yankees for 11 and the Yankees again for 11 more. That's baseball. The Mets went 13-3 and then 23-33. That's baseball.

In other words, while the best words in our vocabulary for the swings in performance within a season are words like ‘variance’ and ‘randomness,’ those words fall short of describing the phenomenon. The season is so long, with such a demanding and uneven schedule, that teams can have sustained performances that reach to the extremes, and those stretches can be backed by real things, even though they’re ultimately unexplainable (except in hindsight, which is no way to go about explaining something).

More Sheehan:

Remember, I didn't cherry-pick those correlations above. The Gregorians did. [He’d just run through some monthly records.] If I were cherry-picking, I'd probably support my case by pointing at the Phillies going 11-23, then 6-0, then 6-24. The Dodgers followed up 22-10 with 17-23. The Pirates went 12-15, then 27-12. These aren't outliers. These are just baseball teams bouncing through 162 games the way teams do every single season.

In that light, I thought I would mention this: Our Playoff Odds report through the games of July 1 shows the Cardinals averaging 96.8 wins at season’s end, across the 10,000 simulations we use to build the report. At the dawn of the season, the same simulation regimen—not yet privy to the season-ending injuries that would befall Adam Wainwright and Matt Adams—churned up an average Cardinals win total of 87.2. Halfway into the season, despite losing two key cogs, St. Louis has gotten off to a hot enough start to run away with the NL Central, at least in the computers’ estimation. But is that true?

We have the entire two-Wild Card Era’s Playoff Odds Reports archived. You can see them yourself: just add “?maxdate=YYYY-MM-DD” with the date you want to see to the end of the URL of the normal Odds Report. To save you a little time, though, I went through each of the seasons we have, and looked up the projected win totals for every team on Opening Day, then on the Fourth of July, and then I looked up their final win totals. Here’s all of that in tables!

2012 American League

Team

Opening Day Projection

July 4th Projection

Final Win Total

New York Yankees

91.7

95.1

95

Boston Red Sox

83.5

83.8

69

Tampa Bay Rays

83.7

83.6

90

Baltimore Orioles

75.3

80.5

93

Toronto Blue Jays

76.0

78.7

73

Chicago White Sox

87.2

88.2

85

Cleveland Indians

83.6

83.6

68

Detroit Tigers

86.6

83.1

88

Kansas City Royals

69.7

71.3

72

Minnesota Twins

69.0

68.9

66

Texas Rangers

94.9

97.4

93

Anaheim Angels

90.1

89.2

89

Oakland Athletics

73.8

78.3

94

Seattle Mariners

68.8

68.5

75

2012 National League

Team

Opening Day Projection

July 4th Projection

Final Win Total

Washington Nationals

80.5

90.5

98

Atlanta Braves

85.6

85.3

94

New York Mets

79.1

84.2

74

Miami Marlins

84.3

78.9

69

Philadelphia Phillies

86.0

77.6

81

Cincinnati Reds

86.7

88.4

97

St. Louis Cardinals

87.4

87.8

88

Pittsburgh Pirates

74.7

84.3

79

Milwaukee Brewers

90.4

80.4

83

Chicago Cubs

73.3

67.7

61

Houston Astros

61.9

63.4

55

San Francisco Giants

86.6

88.7

94

Los Angeles Dodgers

80.0

84.4

86

Arizona Diamondbacks

83.9

82.2

81

San Diego Padres

78.6

69.9

76

Colorado Rockies

76.8

66.3

64

2013 American League

Team

Opening Day Projection

July 4th Projection

Final Win Total

Boston Red Sox

83.0

93.0

97

Tampa Bay Rays

84.9

86.6

91

Baltimore Orioles

75.3

85.3

85

New York Yankees

87.5

85.2

85

Toronto Blue Jays

82.3

78.9

74

Detroit Tigers

89.2

91.4

93

Cleveland Indians

81.3

84.4

92

Kansas City Royals

78.2

78.0

86

Minnesota Twins

70.3

72.5

66

Chicago White Sox

78.6

71.0

63

Texas Rangers

86.1

90.5

91

Oakland Athletics

82.5

89.8

96

Anaheim Angels

88.1

81.3

78

Seattle Mariners

79.3

74.0

71

Houston Astros

68.6

61.2

51

2013 National League

Team

Opening Day Projection

July 4th Projection

Final Win Total

Atlanta Braves

82.8

90.6

96

Washington Nationals

86.2

82.8

86

Philadelphia Phillies

81.4

77.7

73

New York Mets

80.4

73.9

74

Miami Marlins

71.3

65.1

62

St. Louis Cardinals

81.5

92.1

97

Pittsburgh Pirates

79.7

91.8

94

Cincinnati Reds

89.2

90.9

90

Chicago Cubs

78.0

74.3

66

Milwaukee Brewers

78.4

71.0

74

Arizona Diamondbacks

83.1

82.6

81

Los Angeles Dodgers

88.7

81.0

92

Colorado Rockies

73.6

79.2

74

San Francisco Giants

83.6

78.4

76

San Diego Padres

77.0

75.5

76

2014 American League

Team

Opening Day Projection

July 4th Projection

Final Win Total

Toronto Blue Jays

81.1

84.8

83

Baltimore Orioles

78.1

82.9

96

New York Yankees

82.1

81.7

84

Boston Red Sox

85.3

77.0

71

Tampa Bay Rays

87.9

76.7

77

Detroit Tigers

85.1

90.5

90

Kansas City Royals

79.5

82.7

89

Cleveland Indians

79.6

79.6

85

Chicago White Sox

77.5

76.0

73

Minnesota Twins

74.7

75.0

70

Oakland Athletics

84.0

94.7

88

Anaheim Angels

86.4

91.3

98

Seattle Mariners

81.6

85.4

87

Texas Rangers

82.2

72.2

67

Houston Astros

70.1

69.8

70

2014 National League

Team

Opening Day Projection

July 4th Projection

Final Win Total

Washington Nationals

82.8

90.6

96

Atlanta Braves

86.2

82.8

79

Miami Marlins

81.4

77.7

77

New York Mets

80.4

73.9

79

Philadelphia Phillies

71.3

65.1

73

Milwaukee Brewers

80.2

88.1

82

St. Louis Cardinals

85.9

87.3

90

Cincinnati Reds

81.2

83.7

76

Pittsburgh Pirates

79.2

83.0

88

Chicago Cubs

74.9

74.9

73

Los Angeles Dodgers

94.1

91.2

94

San Francisco Giants

84.9

87.3

88

San Diego Padres

81.4

73.9

77

Colorado Rockies

77.3

71.8

66

Arizona Diamondbacks

78.1

70.9

64

We have here a sample of 90 team seasons, and an opportunity to look at which ended up closer to their preseason projection, and which ended up closer to their midseason one. Of the 90, I see 15 teams whose Opening Day expected win total better reflected their finish than their July 4 projection. By my count, 29 more teams either didn’t see a significant change in expected record over the first three months of their seasons, or ended up with a record more or less halfway between the preseason and midseason expectations. That leaves 46 teams—the slimmest possible majority in this sample—for whom the first half was valuable information, the kind one would be foolish to disregard.

Now, these projected records bake in a little more than just the variance Sheehan described in his column. They also move in response to injuries and trades. Still, there’s some evidence that his theory is correct here, and some to contradict it: banked deviation from an expectation does seem to matter, but maybe that’s only true if the expectation was fundamentally broken in the first place. It appears that very large changes over that first half overwhelmingly indicate a real and lasting change, whereas any shift of fewer than seven games is dicey. There are exceptions, though. Consider the 2014 A’s and Brewers, both of whom saw their projected win total shoot up during the first half, only to end up more or less right where their preseason expectations had them.

Obviously, I don’t have a crystal ball here. I can’t offer firm answers on whether Sheehan is right or wrong. I find the notion of real but intangible variance compelling, but the math is on the side of those who would treat St. Louis’s 108-win first-half pace as a virtual knockout punch to the Pirates and Cubs. Then again, maybe the way to parse this is to use history as a guide to the numbers. When you see the Royals go from 76.5 to 87.2 projected wins, as they already have this season, mentally note that there’s a chance (perhaps one in six, perhaps one in 10) that they come all the way back to Earth, and a chance (larger, though no more than 30 percent) that they end up somewhere around .500. That still leaves a 60-percent chance, or thereabouts, that Kansas City turns this hot start into somewhere north of 85 wins, a better than 50/50 shot that they make it to the Postseason.

The Playoff Odds Report gives the Royals a 77.4-percent chance of reaching October, so Royals fans probably won’t appreciate having 20 points shaved off that number. If you see the season the way Sheehan does, though, that’s the thing to do.

Thank you for reading

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cmaczkow
7/06
It would be interesting to see each team's prorated record on July 4th as well, so we could compare whether the updated projection was a better predictor of the final number of wins than just using the team's W/L record on July 4th.
capnbarboza
7/06
Agreed. I was expecting to find 2015s number to compare.
timber
7/06
I think there's more than a small chance that the projections have underestimated the Royals for the third straight year.