Seattle Mariners With Toughest Remaining Schedule

With three weeks remaining in the Major League Baseball season, the Seattle Mariners are right in the thick of the AL wild card race, with heavy competition from within their own division and from the AL Central. The Oakland Athletics, Seattle Mariners, and Detroit Tigers (or Kansas City Royals – which ever one doesn’t win the AL Central) are the most realistic contenders for the two spots, while the New York Yankees, Cleveland Indians, and Toronto Blue Jays would need monumental efforts to get into the post-season.

FanGraphs’ projections of playoff odds give the Mariners a 51.6% chance of making the playoffs as a wild card. The A’s have a 92.5% chance of making the playoffs as a wild card.   The Royals, while having a 57% chance of winning their division, only have a 16.5% chance of capturing a wild card spot. The odds for the Tigers winning their division are slightly lower at 40.5%, but higher than the Royals to get in via the wild card at 27.3%.

The Indians, Yankees, and Blue Jays really aren’t in a realistic conversation, with wild card playoff odds of 5.6%, 1.4%, and 1.8% respectively (number of games remaining accounts for the Blue Jays, who trail the Yankees in the standings, having higher odds of getting in to the post-season).

While these projections do take into account the remaining schedule and the strength of opponents, it is definitely worth noting that the Mariners have the most difficult way to go, playing teams with an average winning percentage of .531, compared to the A’s with .471, the Tigers with .490, and Royals with .491.

What may work to the Mariners advantage, is they play 11 of their remaining 19 games on the road. While that sounds counter-intuitive, the Mariners are 42-28 on the road, the .685 winning percentage being the best in the majors. In the confines of Safeco, the Mariners have hovered around .500 all year.

A possible explanation for why the Mariners are so much better on the road may lie in how pitcher friendly Safeco is. Safeco is the most difficult park in the AL in which to score runs. On a normative scale of 1.0, Safeco has a 0.889 park factor for runs. Oddly, that doesn’t translate for home runs, where Safeco ranks 3^rd in the AL, behind Yankee Stadium and The Rogers Centre (Toronto), and 8^th in the majors overall with a 1.165 park factor for home runs.

It appears that Mariners pitching is really good at home, but the park elevates opponents’ pitching, as well, whereas on the road Mariners pitching is still really good, but Mariners hitters aren’t penalized by their own ballpark.

If the Mariners were to win half their remaining games at home and continue to win 69% of their remaining games on the road (not inconceivable as they play the Houston Astros three games and the Toronto Blue Jays four games, in addition to four games against the Los Angeles Angels), they would finish the season with 91 wins.

While two teams in the last five years have missed the playoffs with 91 wins (Texas in 2013 and Oakland in 2012), the odds are pretty good for seeing October if a team can get to even 90 wins.

These last three weeks of the AL wild card race should be exciting, and, for the first time since 2001, the Mariners control their own destiny. So, as the late owner of the Oakland Raiders, Al Davis, would have said, “Just win, baby.”