The 60-60 Theory

A friend of mine once said that he had figured out something that no one in SABR had figured out.  I assumed he'd meant some arcane statistic like Win Shares Per Dollar Of Salary, or OBP On A Full Moon, or something like that.

No, he said, it was something so basic, he was surprised no one had ever thought of it before.  He called it the Sixty-And-Sixty Theory, and he actually borrowed it from something his high school golf coach had told him.

The golf coach's advice to the young player was that too many golfers go out on the course expecting to play a perfect game.  When that doesn't happen, the coach went on to say, the golfer comes unglued because he starts to focus on the mistake, and not on the next shot.

Instead, a golfer should go out on a course and expect to hit five very terrific shots, and to hit five absolute howlers.  Thus, when the golfer hooks a drive into the woods, he should chalk that up to the five awful shots he already had mentally prepared for.  The key, according to the coach, was what a golfer did with the other 62 shots in his day (assuming the golfer would shoot a 72).  My friend then appied this theory to baseball, and went to Baseball-Reference.com to do some basic research to see if it could also be applied to pennant races in general.

Here's what he found:

In 95% of all seasons played by all teams since 1900, every team in baseball wins 60 games, and loses 60 games (the 1998 Yankees, 1962 Mets, 1984 Tigers, 2001 Mariners, and so on, obviously are exceptions to this).

Taking the golfing theory and applying it to baseball seasons, my friend rationalizes that every team should go into the season knowing that it should win at least 60 games, and that they will lose at least 60 games.  In this way, the theory goes, teams and their fans should only begin to celebrate or panic once their team has won its 60th game of the season, or lost its 60th game of the season.  The theory, applied then to baseball, is that it is what teams do in those other 42 games (the ones in which the outcome is in doubt) that eventually separates playoff teams from everyone else.

The major hole in the theory is, of course, that it is impossible to know which 60 games a team is "guaranteed" to win, and which 60 games a team is "destined" to lose.  But in reality, we, as fans, know them when we see them.

Take Saturday night's game against the Nationals.  It was 3-0 early, and fairly obvious that Kyle Kendrick didn't have his stuff.  As upset as we may have been with the 8-1 loss, that was probably one of those 60 we were going to lose.

But look back at that 10-9 game against the Dodgers a week or so ago.  It was one of The Sixty, until the Phils made a game of it in the eighth.  Now, the outcome wasn't as concrete as it had been an inning earlier.  This was one of The Forty-Two ... games that could go either way, or games that have the potential for a rally or comeback, or games that could easily be blown late.

Again, the theory has a huge hole in it.  But the basic concepts, I would argue, do hold true if you're a player or a fan.  If fans know their team will lose 60 games, the hope is that any loss up to and including #60 would not be treated as if it were the end of the world.  Conversely, folks should be rooting that the club get to its 60th win as fast as possible, because good things happen with every win after #61 (assuming that #60 comes in July).

Right now, the Phils have 70 wins, and only 53 losses.  They've already won 10 of those 42 games leftover after 60-60.  To get to 90 wins, they need only 20 more, with 39 to play.  That means that the Phils can play .500 ball from here on out and still win 90 games.  The only question left is: will 90 wins be enough to make the playoffs?

So, relax, Phillies fans ... the boys still have, if you even remotely believe in the theory, seven games that they will most definitely lose between now and the end of the season.  It's what they now do with the other 32 games remaining where the outcome is in doubt that will determine this race in 2010.