'23 AL Playoff Picture
- Thread starter JM3
- Start date
Careful - still five left vs MFY: four at home starting 9/11, as part of a 13 game divisional run 9/4 - 9/17. Gauntlet supreme - if we’re still in it.
In an ideal world, Houston ends up outside the playoffs. I hate all TX teams almost as much as all NY teams. Preferably the Sox sweep the Arstos and somehow the Jays, Sox and Seattle all make it in.
Of course this also somehow has the Rays collapsing also. I’m just fantasizing.
Reality- Jays win.
Seattle wins.
Sox win.
Sox still 2.5 out.
It’s not out of the realm of possibility that Seattle takes the west division, and the Rangers and Astros both fall behind in the wildcard. Crazier things might have happened!
As much as I'd like to see it, all three have relatively cupcake schedules that have Oakland games baked in.
Toronto has a twelve game stretch starting Aug. 28th with Washington, Colorado, Oakland, and KC. After that, they have a make or break run against Texas and the rest of the AL East.
The Sox really need to keep their heads above water the next ten games. After that, they've got more of a chance than I initially thought theyhad at the trade deadline as NYY are not necessarily world-beaters. TB has lost some key players to say the least. They might also hit an Orioles team (four in Fenway South) at the end of the season that is trying to rest some some players/set their rotation for the playoffs.
The next 10 games after today loom large. 10 games against the Astros and Dodgers. Feels like they need to win 6 of those. Need to split the 4 gamer @HOU and then take 4 of 6 in Fenway
Blowing that 3 run lead in Seattle a few weeks back is looking like a killer right now. They’d only be a half game back of SEA if they held onto that one.
I’m just hoping they are still in the thick of it come September and then I’ll readjust my expectations at that point.
There's definitely a path. It's a tougher one than pretty much the rest of the AL and they are pretty much in a hole since going forward they have, by far, the toughest schedule of the contenders. I keep coming back to their inability to dominate the weaker teams (for whatever the reason) as the Achille's Heel that might prevent them from making the playoffs.
Baby steps. Baby steps. I'm still trying to wrap my hands around the idea that Baltimore is currently the best team in the American League.
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After the disastrous 4-14 stretch in early July, Rays have righted the ship and are 14-9 since. Went 4-2 on west coast this week despite getting the news that they’ve lost a Cy Young caliber ace for 18 months to TJ and some other guy probably forever.
The baseball season is really long. There's still about a quarter of it left and the only reason the Rays are in the playoffs is because they had an amazingly great first quarter of the season. It's entirely possible that the Blue Jays or Mariners or whoever go nuts over the last quarter and upend the entire race. When the trade deadline passes, a lot of people look at it like the races are already decided and teams are setting their playoff rosters. But it's really nowhere close.
Or some team called the Red Sox gets hot and out runs them all.
The guys we've been talking about coming back are back, and we just traded for the best 9 hole slugger in the league.
It wouldn't shock me if the Sox had the best record in the league the rest of the way.
It's possible given how the Sox play to their level of competition. It's a very high expectation though and almost everything has to bounce their way given the teams that they have to jump and their respective schedules.
It’s all good. It was the same idea carried from one season to the next. The days of being too rigid/stiff and waiting for the other shoe to drop were being put behind us…at least that was the general vibe of those slogans.
Turns out it worked!
As I posted above, I just want this team to still be right in the race come September. That means they will have to play well during that 10 game stretch against HOU/LAD.
We knew what Raffy is coming into the season and it's unlikely he's going to get all that much better.
The whole thing about moving Raffy off third is going to have to happen relatively soon, but I don't see a good near term plan.
Win games and we're in. Pretty much that simple. It's a hard schedule. We gotta win a bunch of games. But we control our own fate and that's a pretty big thing.
It is? He’s 26 years old and just signed a $331 million extension. Unless “relatively” is doing an awful lot of work there, I’d be stunned if he is moved off of 3B in anything resembling the “near term.”
Wrong thread for this, but yeah, I think it's more likely that he's still playing 3rd for the Sox in 5 years than moving off of it in the near term.
Bit reminiscent of 2003 where we thought the target was Oakland, but it was Seattle
Unless Devers’ weight balloons (or Antonio Anderson develops into an elite 3Bman), I don’t think he was extended with the belief that he’d be a DH in the first half of that contract before his 30th birthday.
Devers defense seems like a much more manageable problem when he’s going 3-4 and hitting bombs off the Yankees.
Been awhile since they had 4 starters in a 4 game series and none had to pitch "the best game of his career" to win.
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Houston’s rotation hasn’t been pitching that well either recently. Red Sox really need a split at minimum down in Houston. But 3 of 4 is completely doable if they can hit these guys.
That kind of offense would have earned Devers a Gold Glove about 10 years ago.
Tough one. based on xW-L they should be 10 games back of both Tampa and Texas.
Or, the Pythagorean record is a thing that normally works but sometimes doesn’t. To outperform your pythag just means when you win, you win by less than when you lose. Orioles are +6, Rays -5, Tigers +6, Rangers -8, Marlins +6, Brewers +5, Cubs -4, Padres -10…
I think if you know a teams RS/RA, you can usually estimate their W/L. But not always…and the difference is hard to attribute to anything, IMO.
This has been a point of contention on the forum for decades now. I think most of the evidence backs up your position but at least some evidence also exists that if you have an elite bullpen/closer, then you can outperform your Pythag by a bit, though it certainly doesn’t explain anything close to 8-10 games in a single season.
Years ago, I think it was the 2008 Rays who outperformed their Pythag by many games which was the difference between the Red Sox winning the division and merely getting the wildcard. At the time, many said it was due to Joe Maddon’s genius handling of the bullpen and late game substitutions/shifting. A year later, the Rays fell back to earth in close games despite most of the same key players and the same manager and they missed the playoffs comfortably.
Love the sentiment and I agree. The Sox really have to just keep winning games in the face of a tough schedule, but will also need a bit of help from Toronto and especially Seattle. The Mariners next 12 games look like this...3 with the White Sox, 3 with the Royals, 3 with the A's and 3 with the Mets.
Great call. I remember going to the Friday night game in late August against Seattle. It was the first of a four game series, with a rare Monday game to end the series. The Sox were 4 back of Seattle headed into the series, and 1 game back of Oakland. The Sox took the Friday night game and I distinctly remember my dad saying something like “the Sox could sweep this series with the way the pitching is lined up”. And he was / is an eternal pessimist. And the Sox did indeed sweep the series and emerged from the weekend tied with Seattle. And they never looked back.
Hm, yeah, the 2008 Rays were +5 and the Sox were dead on their pythag. That same year the Angels were +12, which has been done several times in recent history, but the recent record is +14, the 2021 Mariners. The norm is that the vast majority of teams generally fall pretty close to their xW-L, and you have years like 2010 where 28 teams were all within no more than 4 games of their pythag. The Mariners have seasons of +12 and +14 all in the last five years, which probably just means that Jerry DiPoto is versed in the dark arts.