The Baseballsphere Blog

Of course, one could say that the “most .500” Major League Baseball team in any given year is the one whose record is closest to .500, or 81-81 in a full season. But even a hypothetical team that always had exactly a 50% chance of winning would sometimes end up, by luck of the “coin flip”, a few games away from .500.

And what about a team that’s great for the first half of the season, then awful for the second half, ending up with a .500 record? They weren’t really a .500 team at any point in the season, in that their chance of winning games wasn’t actually close to 50% at any point, nor were they winning about half their games in any given week.

So here are a few different ways to measure how .500 a team was, along with the top teams by each method.

Final Record

We can just look at a team’s final record and see how many games away from .500 it was, above or below.

The Boston Red Sox had the only .500 record, but several other teams were close.

Run Differential

This was mentioned in Sarah Langs’ 2020 article What does a true .500 team look like?

The run differential of a team is the runs it scores over the entire season minus the runs it allowed in that same time. A small run differential is a good predictor of a team that will have a record near .500. (There is even a stat called Pythagorean expectation which estimates what record a team should have based on it totals of runs scored and runs allowed.)

Whose run differential was closest to 0 in 2024?

Four teams had a run differential close to 0. Of these, again, the Boston Red Sox were the closest to 0, just barely. It seems we have a frontrunner.

Number of times at .500

A team that plays “a .500 brand of baseball” throughout the season is likely to have a winning percentage of exactly .500 at several times during the course of the season. The most times this could possibly happen is 81, though even for a hypothetical team that always has a 50% chance of winning, the odds of that happening 81 times are over 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1 against. The most times it’s ever been done, at least before 2020, is 35 by the 1959 Chicago Cubs.

The Tampa Bay Rays came close to that this year, tying for 3rd most. The Padres, Red Sox, and Cardinals also had a lot.

For fun: consecutive times at .500

This last one is more about the luck of streaks than anything else. But there was an interesting streak this year in this regard, so I thought I’d throw it in.

When a team is at .500 in the middle of the season, the next game they play takes them off of .500; it’s only 2 games later that they can be back at .500 again. So a streak of consecutive times at .500 means that at the end of every 2 games played after being at .500, they’re back at .500 again.

The Red Sox were at 26-26 on May 25, 2024 – 26 wins and 26 losses. Two games after that they were 27-27, then 28-28, 29-29, and so on up to 35-35. That’s ten times in a row at .500. The likelihood of that happening, once a team has reached a .500 record, is more than 500-to-1 against.

Here are the longest such streaks in the majors in 2024:

The “Winner”

It’s gotta be the Boston Red Sox as The Most .500 Team of 2024. They top every list except number of times at .500, and they did pretty well there, too. Runner up goes to the Tampa Bay Rays.

Interestingly, these two teams played each other in their last 3 games of the season, with the Rays winning the first two but losing the final game. Had they won it, they would have replaced the Red Sox atop the Final Record list, probably solidified the Red Sox hold on the Run Differential list, but strengthened their own position atop the Times At .500 list. That game was something of a battle for Most .500 Team of 2024. Congratulations, Red Sox, on your “victory”!