One of baseball's sacred liturgies involves fans and observers joining hands, rising as one, and bellowing premature judgments based on this or that team's first few games of the season. It happens every season. When the 2018 Mets started 11-1, most of us indulged in fantasies/nightmares of the percolating colossus in Queens. Well, they wound up 18 games under .500 from that point forward. They found their level over the (much) larger sample of games.
This season, we did it again. The Cubs started the 2019 campaign with a grim 1-6 mark, and we were all wondering aloud whether the boomlet on the north side is over. Since then, the Cubs -- who have ripped off four straight playoff appearances -- have gone 21-7, and by a comfortable margin they have the best run differential in the NL. Yes, a number of those games have come against the comically hapless Marlins, but right now the SportsLine Projection Model gives the Cubs almost a 60 percent chance of prevailing in the tough NL Central.
This, after all, is a team that won 95 games a season ago despite a number of injury concerns. Yes, the Cubs had a disappointing offseason by the standards of a deep-coffered team with designs on the World Series, but that didn't change the baseline. Back was their core of MVP-upside position players and intact was the veteran rotation.
On the other end of the continuum we have the 2019 Mariners. Last season they won 89 games, but coming off yet another failed run at the postseason, the front office undertook a pivot. Gone were central contributors like Robinson Cano, Edwin Diaz, James Paxton, Jean Segura, Nelson Cruz, Mike Zunino, Denard Span, and they were replaced by mid-term types that would keep the team from entirely cratering while still making them worse.
So did a 13-2 start to the season change those estimations? It shouldn't have. Since those very successful first 15 games, the Mariners have gone 7-18 and at the moment are a .500 team. SportsLine now tabs them for 83 wins and gives them less than a 1-in-4 chance of making the playoffs. All of that would've passed the preseason sniff test, and that still holds as we head toward the middle of May.
To a lesser extent, the champion Red Sox provide the same object lesson. They barged to 108 wins a season ago and the belt and the title (despite a brutal postseason slate). In 2019, though, they lost eight of their first 10 and on April 17 were a season-worst seven games under .500. Methodically, though, they've pulled back to .500 despite all the hand-wringing and palace intrigue. At this juncture, SportsLine gives them a close to a coin-flip shot at the playoffs. Those aren't bad odds for a team that's currently in third place. Also, the Sox's schedule has them playing, on average, .500 teams the rest of the way, and to date 23 of their 38 games have come on the road.
You don't need to look very far to find examples of the in-season variance that's so common to baseball. Those 2018 Red Sox lost five of seven at one point. The 2017 Indians, who won a record 22 games in a row at one point, lost seven of 10 on two different occasions. The 104-win 2017 Dodgers lost 11 in a row and 16 of 17. The champion Cubs of 2016 lost nine of 10. We could, of course, go on.
Look, we get weird outcomes even over the course of an entire season -- the 1987 Twins, for instance, won it all despite being outscored by the opposition for the year -- so it stands to reason that we often get counterintuitive results over a much smaller sample. Framed another, smaller way ...
There's a lot of structural parity in baseball, and it's built to defy expectations in the short run in ways that are foreign to someone who focuses solely on, say, basketball or football. Given that the start to a season is all the information we have about that season, we're especially prone to putting outsized emphasis on how a team begins a given campaign. When those early results run wildly counter to reasonable expectations, pumping the brakes for a while is always good policy.
It's a long season with peaks and troughs for even the best and worst of squadrons. Every year we forget that all over again.
