July 27, 2008
Tight Races
The Cardinals 14 inning victory over the Mets Saturday night resulted in both the NL East and NL Central races getting tighter. The Mets lead the Phillies and Marlins by one game, while the Cubs and Brewers are tied for the NL Central lead with Cardinals three games back.
Right now, there are three division races involving three teams within three games of first place, two division races where two teams are less than four games apart and only one blow out race (the AL West). All in all, there are 19 teams in first or ten games out of first place. It a very exciting race, and we've already seen a number of substantial comebacks. I've been trying to score the season to see if it is indeed tighter than others through 7/26, and the best I can do right now is look at the standard deviation of winning percentage among the 30 teams:
Through games of July 26th in the given season.
| Season | WPct STD |
|---|
| 2007 | 0.0587 |
| 2000 | 0.0612 |
| 2008 | 0.0658 |
| 2005 | 0.0692 |
| 1999 | 0.0704 |
| 2004 | 0.0742 |
| 2006 | 0.0745 |
| 2002 | 0.0838 |
| 2001 | 0.0842 |
| 2003 | 0.0856 |
| 1998 | 0.0871 |
Last year at this time the races were close, but there were few really bad teams. Cleveland had yet to go on their streak that buried the rest of the AL Central. In 2000, there were more big division leads, but few really bad teams.
So in 2008, we seem to have a good mix for tight division races. A few bad teams allow the decent teams to put together winning streaks. Combined with none of the good teams being truly outstanding (even the Angels, the only team over .600, are far exceeding their projected winning percentage), and almost every division is up for grabs. It should be a fun last two months of the year.
