Sixty-game MLB projection yields wild finish
Make no mistake: Getting on the field and staying there will be the hard part for Major League Baseball in 2020.
And should they manage to pull off a 60-game season within the COVID-19 pandemic, sorting out a true champion will provide a challenge of its own.
When the novel coronavirus shut down the sport on March 12, USA TODAY Sports had long since released its projected win totals for 2020, an aggregation of six panelists’ projections that included a 100game winner and four 100-game losers.
Now,
Sixty games is far from a representative sample and MLB and its players will be the first to admit it. It’s the best they can do, however, amid a pandemic and, to a lesser extent, labor jousting that delayed the oftendiscussed when and where this season will unfold.
So what will that look like? In short, a minuscule distance between the game’s blue bloods and its basement dwellers. There’s simply no time to establish separation when you’re contesting a mere 37% of the season.
Case in point: The National it’s anybody’s ballgame.
League wild-card situation.
Over our 162-game projection, four teams – the Mets, Phillies, Reds and Diamondbacks – finished with 85 wins and tied for the second wildcard spot, which is pretty crazy already. But over 60 games, teams projected to win between 83 and 85 games all land on 31 wins. So, add the Padres and the Brewers to that mix – with the 30-30 Cubs just a game behind.
In short, the line between good and great is extremely blurred. And MLB might want to dust off its contingency plans for multiteam tiebreaker games.
Our six-person panel’s aggregate projections:
American League East National League East