Conventional wisdom says a bad start isn’t enough for fans to lose all hope of the playoffs. According to the last two decades of baseball history, that wisdom isn’t all that wise.
If you’re a fan of the Philadelphia Phillies, Seattle Mariners, St. Louis Cardinals or Toronto Blue Jays, you can go ahead and spend that money you might have been saving for playoff tickets this fall. The last 21 seasons of MLB history say that your team won’t be part of the playoff hunt, and can most likely start to write the narrative about 2017 as a losing season.
Over the aforementioned span (1996-2016), teams have started out a season with a winning percentage of .300 or worse through their first 10 games on 103 separate occasions. Of those 103 teams, only 13 (12.6 percent) played well enough to finish above .500. As should be expected, the percentages only go down when considering additional success from that point.
In these 103 instances, only five of these teams qualified for a playoff spot. Only twice has a team overcome such a start to win its division that same year. Starting a season at 3-7 or worse has been a near death sentence for advancing in the postseason.
The 2002 Anaheim Angels are the only team in the past 21 seasons to start out the regular season 3-7 or worse and win a playoff series in that same year. Angels fans will remember that season for another reason, however, as they claimed the World Series title that year.
Fans may believe the second wild card helps out. Surely that has improved the odds for teams who get off to rough starts. Actually, no. The numbers show the opposite effect.
Reducing the sample to just full seasons which have been played since the second wild card was introduced (2012-2016), there have been 24 teams during that time which started the regular season 3-7 or worse. Only two of them (the 2015 San Francisco Giants and 2016 Houston Astros) finished with winning records. None of them made the playoffs.
Related Story: MLB Opening Week attendance is on the rise, and that’s a good thing
Whether fans want to consider the 21 most-recent seasons of MLB history as enough evidence to give up on their hopes of their team playing in October is up to them. What can’t be disputed, however, is that recent history is strongly stacked against that happening.