Renewed optimism!?

Post by Mike

It would be very easy to fall into the pit of misery ... "Dilley Dilley"... after a 2017 Super Bowl collapse, a putrid season of Braves baseball, and watching the Great Satan pull a Hawaiian QB out of his ass to top the Dawgs.

But I'm not going there. We are going forward and over the next few months we will all enjoy March Madness, the Masters, then ... the Braves. Enjoy might be a stretch on that last one, but personally I've decided to approach this year with low expectations.

It would be a wildly successful season if the Braves managed to claim the second Wild Card in the NL. Last season Colorado grabbed that spot with a 87-75 record and a +67 run differential (RDIFF). Every team in the National League that was over .500 for the season had a positive RDIFF.

The top five finishers had RDIFF that looked like this:

Division winners -
Dodgers +190
Nationals +147
Cubs +127

Wild cards -
Diamondbacks +153
Rockies +67

The Brewers (+35) and Cardinals (+56) were the only other NL teams to have a plus side RDIFF.

I can hear you screaming the questions? The answer... the Braves finished 72-90 with a -89 RDIFF.  
Yeah... we couldn't score or stop the others guys from scoring. So to make the second Wild Card spot theoretically we have to pick up 15 wins and swing our RDIFF by 156 runs. Almost 1 run per game.

That's a tall order folks! This might be a good year to do more fishing.