NL Pennant Race Recap

Derek Zumsteg

There's something going on in the NL that's a lot more exciting than two big guys clubbing balls again (oooh, look, it's number eighty! again! yayyyy) -- some damn fine races and a serious wild card race for the runners-up. This is what the wild card was supposed to bring to baseball: a consolation prize for a team that went .600 and was stuck behind the Braves, say. Let's check out the races real quick:

NL East
Atlanta's maintaining a slim three-game lead on the Mets (featuring Gold Glove award-winning shortstop Rey Ordonez, possibly the most overrated player in the majors). I didn't think the Mets would be this good, but they're hanging in there. At this point, though, a three game lead is larger than it appears, and I don't think the Mets are going to catch them.

NL Central
Now here's a divisional race. The perpetually smart Astros have danced brilliantly this year, battling injuries by developing solutions from within. They're winning thanks to another great pitching performance and despite the amazingly crappy performance of Derek Bell. I can only think of a few other teams in baseball that could cope with such problems like the Astros without collapsing. In Ohio, the Reds have gotten great performances from people the pundits didn't see at season's open and are a scant game behind the Astros. I don't think the Reds will make it, but then I'm a huge Astros fan.

NL West
How 'bout those D-backs, huh?

Absolute Standings

Team	Win	Loss	Pct.	Runs Scored	Runs Allowed	Predicted Win Pct.	Real/Predicted Win Difference
Atlanta	83	49	.629	688	556	.605	+3
NYM	79	52	.603	693	596	.575	+4
Arizona	78	53	.595	723	541	.641	-6
Houston	78	54	.591	653	532	.601	-1
Cincinnati	75	54	.581	661	564	.579	0
SF	69	61	.531	706	673	.524	+1

Okay, I threw the Giants in there for humor value. And there is the off chance Bonds is going to get angry about not playing for a contender, spend the money to clone himself, and play all nine positions.

Five teams over .580, only four will get to the post-season (in the AL, there are three super teams and then two .550s... and the Mariners). The predicted wins are figured by the pythagorean method:

RS^2 / (RS^2 + RA^2) = Winning Percentage

RS = Runs Scored

RA = Runs Allowed

This gets you a beautiful predictor of how a team would do if it performed this well in terms of runs scored and allowed, over and over, in a statistically pure world (unless they're managed by Lou Piniella, who consistently loses more games than we'd predict).

What's interesting when you do this is that you see who's been lucky, season-to date. In this case, it's been the NL East teams, particularly New York, surprisingly playing out of their head despite Clubhouse Cancer Bonilla (um, so I guess this is the 'Chemistry through Bad Chemistry' school of retroactive pundit explanation).

However, the big surprise is Arizona. I actually went and re-checked those run numbers on a competing site to make sure I wasn't the victim of a typo -- I had no idea they'd scored one run less than the natives of Planet Coors. The Diamondbacks should be way, way ahead of the Giants by now, and the fact that they're playing better than their record shows is bad news for miracle worker Baker and the last season in Candlestick.

Other conclusions: the Astros are likely to pull off their umpteenth divisional title in a row. The wild card race is more interesting than it appears at first glance -- despite their three-game lead on the Reds, the Mets have been lucky so far this season, and if there's one thing teams shouldn't count on, it's luck. If the Mets were smart, they'd play a decent-fielding, decent-hitting shortstop on the field, like Edgardo Alfonzo, and plug that offensive blackhole. But I digress.

Now it's predictions time. Divisional winners -- Atlanta, Houston and Arizona. The Wild Card goes to the go-go Mets, because I want Yankee fans to feel marginally less smug about themselves.

about the author

Derek Zumsteg has been known to write his articles in the nude, against the wishes of the rest of the Strikethree.com crew. Remind him that this is a family website when you write him at dmz@strikethree.com. [Ask Jason Barker what he was smoking when he wrote this 'about the author' at jmb@strikethree.com]