Can-Do Attitude

[Frayed Knot]

Time for our weekly re-visit of this thread.

21-11 since we laid down the mark of needing 25-13 to close out the season - and it's looking like that 87 win projection will be right about on the nose even though, at the time, I was likely thinking of that as good enough for the second WC mark rather than the first because we were in no position to be that greedy back then.

So a 4-2 finish from here probably does the trick and would mean that:
- the Giants could go 4-2 AND the Cards 5-2 and we'd be in the #1 WC slot with those two fighting it out for who gets to come to CitiField
- if the Cards cooperate by losing at least two then the Giants could even go 5-1 and we'd still be WC #1 by virtue of the tie-breaker
- as long as EITHER of SF/StL loses at least 2 more games then we'll clinch one of the WC slots even if the other runs the table

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

Yeah 4-2 does it. Also would meet the RUSH finish of 21-12 in last 33.

[Guest d'Kong76]

I'm not shaving my armpits this week, time to man up!

[Benjamin Grimm]

The Mets have a magic number of 6 over the Cardinals and 6 over the Giants.

If all goes well the next few days, the Mets can clinch one of the two Wild Card positions by the end of Wednesday's action. (That's the day after tomorrow!)

On the more pessimistic side, the Mets have guaranteed that their games will have meaning at least through Friday. Their tragic number against the Giants is 8 and it's 9 for the Cardinals. If everything goes wrong, meaning 17 unhappy outcomes in 17 games over the next five days, the Mets will be eliminated at the end of Friday's action. That seems pretty unlikely, but it means that, as of the moment, the extent of their "Minimum Window of Meaningfulness" (that's the MWOM) is Friday, September 30. Let's see if, and how quickly, the Mets can push the MWOM to October 2 and then to October 5.

[Guest Mets Guy in Michigan]

John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote: Yeah 4-2 does it. Also would meet the RUSH finish of 21-12 in last 33.

Nice! If Thor, Cespedes and Bartolo could pose in Rush kimonos, that would be cool.

Rush did come out for the encores wearing Islander jerseys on the first time I saw them -- the night before the team won its first Cup.

[Frayed Knot]

I figured they'd be Maple Leaf fans (I know Geddy is a big Blue Jays guy) but I guess they know how to suck up to local audiences.




BP's playoff odds put the Mets at 83.7% (a bit better than 5 of 6), the Cards at 60.6%, the Giants at 55.6%
Neither of the other non-eliminated teams, Miami & Pitt, have any odds at all (or too small to put a number on).

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

Our best-case is an outright win and them 2 finishing in a tie, then playing a 30-inning play-in game.

[Frayed Knot]

Frayed Knot wrote: Centerfield wrote: We don't even need 8 (though it certainly would be nice). Three straight wins against St. Louis would make things really interesting with plenty of time left in the season. Yeah we don't need a streak so much as they just have to win consistently. As with the East division last year, this year's WC race is being left open by a bunch of teams none of which is likely to hit 90 wins. So with 38 games left it's possible that they could squeak in by going 25-13 or even a game or two worse. 25 wins would put them at 87 on the year, the WC-leading SFG are currently headed for 88.5

That was from this thread on August 23rd when they had just climbed back to .500 (62-62) after taking two straight from ... the Giants!!
Record since then is 25-12
Wins = 87 (with a shot at 88).
And, yeah, they pretty much squeaked in.

[Centerfield]

Great work. In fact, it's hard to be any more right than you were then.

[Centerfield]

I love how we all flip flop back and forth between ("We can do this!") to ("Fuck man, let's play the kids.") in the beginning of this thread.

In the end, both schools of thought were correct.

[Centerfield]

And you know what the crazy thing is? If they can get by Bumgarner and then the Cubs (tall orders, I get it), then the LCS and WS are wide open.

They are capable of beating both Washington and the Dodgers, and not one AL team scares me.

WE CAN FUCKING DO THIS.

[Frayed Knot]

Centerfield wrote: Great work. In fact, it's hard to be any more right than you were then.

And just to be clear here, I wasn't right in that I thought they were going to finish that way, only that those numbers were right around where they'd need to finish in order to be in the WC mix.
But I was subject to blowing hot & cold on this squad as much as anyone.

The cool part is that their run began just two days before we started throwing the numbers around (games 3 & 4 of the Giants series) and how, even though it was right on the heels of that stretch of five losses in six games to the DBacks, from that day forward the team stayed almost perfectly on that pace with the mid-Sept Braves series being the only real stumbling block along the way.

[Benjamin Grimm]

The ups and downs for 2016 are somewhat similar to 2015. Notable differences are that the brief dip below .500 came later in 2016, and the surge at the end of the season was much more dramatic in 2015.