Playoffs? A formula to get there (maybe)

Updated Saturday 7/7: I said 86 wins may get the Cardinals to the playoffs. Here's some statistical confirmation. Based on simulation play, the chances of making the playoffs at 86 victories is 70% (scroll down for the table). At 85 wins, it drops to 49.5%.

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The St. Louis Cardinals have now completed 81 games, or one-half, of their 2007 schedule. With a record of 38-43, it's the worst performance of the Tony La Russa era.

You have to go back to 1995, the last year of Anheuser-Busch ownership, to find a Cardinals team with a worse first half performance. (For some fun with the standings, check out BaseballRace.com.)

There's something else different about this team. For only the second time since the calendar rolled over to Y2K, the Cardinals find themselves looking up in the standings at the midway point.

Since the beginning of what may be called the Jim Edmonds/Albert Pujols era (Edmonds arrived in 2000, Pujols a year later), the Cardinals have dominated the NL Central. Here's what the standings have looked like each season halfway through.

The 2001 and 2007 seasons are the only two in the last eight where the Cardinals have not been in first place. It's hard to find many similarities beyond that.

That 2001 team poured it on in the second half -- going 53-28 in their last 81 games to finish at 93-69.

The '01 version of the Cards featured a 22-game winner in Matt Morris and a 16-game winner in Darryl Kyle. The team ERA was 3.93. Six St. Louis hitters hit at least 15 home runs.

Here's the total of runs scored and runs allowed for the 2001 team compare to the projected version of 2007 squad.

Nearly a complete reversal. Of course, that 2001 performance was greatly shaped by the blistering second half. For the 2007 bunch to put up equal numbers, here's what the final 81 games would have to look like.

The 2007 Cardinals are scoring 4.3 runs per game and allowing 5.17 runs a contest. They would have score 5.74 runs and allow 3.27 to match the 2001 team. Just not going to happen.

Let's construct something more reasonable -- difficult but reasonable. Let's say the offense improves by 20% in the second half and the pitching staff does the same. Here's what those numbers would look like.

A 20% improvement in both the offense and pitching staff would leave the season totals at 768 runs scored and 754 allowed.

According to the Bill James Pythagorean theorem, a team with such a performance can be expected to win 50.9% of its games. That would put the Cards at 82-80.

The Cardinals outperformed their first half projections by four games. The expected wins/losses were 34-47.

Combine that outperformance with a 20% improvement and you're looking at the 86-victory range. Will that be good enough to win the division? Probably not.

Is that good enough for the wildcard? Maybe.

The Cardinals will need to be healthy, get performances from people who've been invisible in the first half (Chris Carpenter) or nearly invisible at times (Scott Rolen), count on poor play from other wildcard contenders and maybe pickup a player or two.

It can be done but everything is going to have break just right for it to happen.