We are at nearly the halfway point in the season, and I’ve been noticing the Red Sox do some similar things to last season. They sure seem to be hitting the .500 mark a lot. They’ve been 18-18, 19-19, 20-20, and more. Now they’re 40-40. So I wondered, how are they stacking up to last season, when I granted them the title of the Most .500 Team in Baseball?
They are excelling, actually. Right now they have the lead.
If you measure by who has the most nearly .500 record, they lead all of baseball there:
If you look at that “Games above .500” column, the Red Sox are the only team at .500. And while teams that have played an odd number of games can be no closer than 1 game from .500, no teams are that close. The Sox are clear “winners” in this category.
We can also look at the number of times a team has been at .500 during the season. This gives an idea of whether the team has consistently played like a .500 team through the year. This time we’re looking at that “Times at .500” column:
Showing just the top 8 teams here. The Red Sox and the Reds are clear leaders in this category.
One more. We can look at which teams have the smallest difference between runs scored by them and runs scored against them. This we have in the Run diff column. Negative numbers mean the team allowed more runs than they scored.
The Red Sox are among the 4 leaders here.
But what I find more interesting is to consider balancing a team’s record against their run differential, because some teams have a positive run differential but a losing record, or vice versa. We have four good examples of this, this year. Now there are those who take a team’s run differential and convert it into a number of expected wins and losses for a team. So I took the difference of those for each team to get an expected number of games above .500 for those teams (see the “Expected GA .500” column). Then I averaged this with their actual games above .500 to see where the expected and actual balance out. These averages are listed in the “Ave GA XGA” column.
The Braves, Rangers, Blue Jays, and Gaurdians all have this contradiction of either a losing record and more runs scored than allowed, or vice versa. And there with them in the top 6 spots are the Red Sox.
There’s one team near the top of all these lists – The Boston Red Sox. If they go on to have a mediocre second half, they could repeat as Most .500 Team two years in a row. But with Alex Bregman coming back before long, and the rookies and second-year players getting better, and the pitching getting better, the Red Sox are looking like a team that will finish pretty well above .500 this time, so a repeat may not be in the cards. But they sure are off to a “good” start.
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