TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

What's a Wild Card Pace?

The other night on ESPN I heard the commentators refer to Atlanta as being "back on pace for the wild card." This seemed like fairly abstract talk, considering that we're not even at the All-Star break yet. But I thought: well, we've had ten years of wild card teams, that's 20 finishes, maybe that's enough data to start looking at what it takes to win the wild card.

In the table that follows, you'll see a complete list of all of baseball's wild card playoff qualifiers, the number of wins they had, and the appropriate winning percentage. I've also included the number of wins and percentage of the second-place team in the "wild card race", often a second-place team in another division, but also occasionally a third-place team in the same division as the wild card qualifier -- one or the other, of course. I list this latter because, theoretically, the number of wins a team needed in a given year was just one more than the wins of the second-place team. This is a minor fallacy, of course, since won-loss records are a zero-sum exercise, so just saying one more win than the next team would suffice isn't necessarily true. But for our purposes, we're going to pretend that it is.

So to figure out the "minimum number of wins to become a wildcard", we take that second-place team's wins and add one.

There are a few outliers. The A's won 102 games on the way to the wildcard behind the record-setting Mariners' 116 wins (as recently as 1993, the Giants won 103 games without making the playoffs). The number of wins by the "second place" team in the wild card "race" was 85 that year, because of all those wins sucked up in the AL West. That's on the low side but not without precedent even with such a small sample of 20 races to look at.

Another minor trend: qualifying for the wildcard is now taking slightly more wins than at the inception of the extra round of playoffs, in the low 90s on average, instead of the high 80s. I speculate that this is because as teams realized a wild card team could, in fact, win the World's Championship, more teams have been gunning for a wild card slot more explicitly, staying in the race longer, and making for closer wild card races.

Almost all the close wildcard races -- ones that went down to the final series for each team -- featured two teams who ended up with win totals in the low 90s.

Excepting the strike-shortened 1995 season, the median number of games sufficient to beat the second-place team is 89. So, 50% of the time 89 wins is sufficient to win the wild card. 94 wins would've won a wild card 95% of the time; 92 wins gets the wild card 80% of the time.

So to answer the question, a "wild card pace" during the season is a minimum of .525, probably better set at .543 (the 50% mark); a team with a winning percentage of .575 will get the wild card 95% of the time.

Looking at today's standings, that means only Boston (.577) among either league is playing at a 'guaranteed' "wild card pace" and not leading its division. If the season ended today, Philadelphia would be the NL wild card winner at .542 -- just at our median number.

Teams that will qualify for the wild card are effectively battling against their entire league of teams; so if you want to keep an eye on your team's wild card "pace" during the season, keep an eye out for those numbers: .525, .543, and .575.

Year	League	WC Team	Wins	Win%	"2nd Place"	Win%2
2004	NL	HOU	92	0.568	91	0.562
2004	AL	BOS	98	0.605	91	0.562
2003	NL	FLA	91	0.562	87	0.537
2003	AL	BOS	95	0.586	93	0.593
2002	NL	SF	95	0.590	92	0.568
2002	AL	ANA	99	0.611	93	0.574
2001	NL	STL	93	0.574	90	0.556
2001	AL	OAK	102	0.630	85	0.525
2000	NL	NYM	94	0.580	86	0.556
2000	AL	SEA	91	0.562	90	0.531
1999	NL	NYM	97	0.595	96	0.589
1999	AL	BOS	94	0.580	87	0.532
1998	NL	CHC	90	0.552	89	0.546
1998	AL	BOS	92	0.568	88	0.543
1997	NL	FLA	92	0.568	88	0.543
1997	AL	NYY	96	0.593	84	0.519
1996	NL	LA	90	0.556	88	0.543
1996	AL	BAL	88	0.543	85	0.525
1995	NL	COL	77	0.542	76	0.528
1995	AL	NYY	79	0.549	78	0.538

posted by The Crank 10:06 PM