A Closer Look at the NL Wildcard Race

Wednesday, September 15 2004 @ 02:24 AM EDT

Contributed by: robertdudek

Theoretically, there are 6 teams in the NL Wildcard race. What are each team's chances of winning the wildcard? In addressing the question, I'm going to ignore the fact that the Astros and Marlins are currently "hot" - momentum can chage on a dime. What I want to do is estimate, mathematically, the expected win total for each contender at the end of the season, given the schedule they have to play. Here is how the standings look at this moment:

team  played  wins  wpct
San Fran 145 80 .552
Chicago 142 78 .549
Houston 145 79 .545
Florida 141 76 .539
San Diego 145 77 .531
Philly 145 74 .510


I calculated the strength of the remaining schedule, and looked at the home road distribution for each team in the race. Strength of schedule (home-road remaining in parentheses):

San Fran .541 (9-8); Chicago .484 (8-12); Houston .522 (9-8); Florida .502 (8-10-3); San Diego .473 (9-8); Philly .474 (10-7)

What this means is that the Giants have the most difficult sked remaining and the Cubs have the easiest of the top four.

I adjusted for the home-field advantage inherent in baseball by increasing the SoS for all games on the road by .040 and decreasing it by .040 for all games at home. These were averaged out, with Florida's neutral site games included (but with an adjustment of zero).

Next, I assumed that each team was in reality a .540 ballclub, and calculated their remaining expected wins. This was added to the wins already accumulated to arrive at an expected win total for the season. Here are the current results:

CHICAGO 89.0
GIANTS 88.5
HOUSTON 87.8
MARLINS 87.2
PADRES 86.7
PHILLIES 83.7

It's very likely that at least one of the first four teams will exceed their expectation by 2 to 3 wins, thus making is highly probable that the wild card team will win no less than 90 games. That's why I think the Phillies are toast - they would have 16 of their remaining 17 hames to finish with 90 wins.



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