TODAY’S SPORTSTAT — Brewers have plenty of competition for wild-card spot
By JERRY TAPP
Through games of August 25, the Milwaukee Brewers are 72-59 and in third place in the National League Central, 4.5 games behind the first place Cubs. Right now, they are tied with Colorado for the second Wild Card spot (division foes the St. Louis Cardinals have the first Wild Card). That second Wild Card spot is pretty tenuous at best; there are six teams all within eight games of the Brewers vying for that Wild Card spot.
With all that being said, the month of September is going to be big for any team within shouting distance of a playoff spot. If history has anything to say about the conclusion of the 2018 pennant race in the N.L., the Brewers are going to have to hold off those six teams that listed below them in the Wild Card race.
Based on the past five seasons (2013-2017), the Cubs and Cardinals have two of the best September records over the past five campaigns. The Cardinals have the third best September record from 2013-17 with an 83-60 record (.580 winning percentage). The Cubs rank fifth in this stat with an 81-61 September record (.570 winning percentage) over the past five seasons. The Brewers? They rank 16th in this stat with a 69-73 mark, a .486 winning percentage.
Here are the September winning percentages of the 30 MLB teams over the past five seasons.
Cleveland .667 … Washington .604
St. Louis .580 … Boston .576 … Chicago Cubs .570
L.A. Dodgers .54 5… L.A. Angels .54 2… N.Y. Yankees .531 … N.Y. Mets .521… Pittsburgh .514 … Toronto .514 … Kansas City .514 … Baltimore .510 … Texas .510… San Francisco .504
Milwaukee .486 … Seattle .482 … Oakland .482 … Tampa Bay .479 … Houston .468 … Arizona .458 … Miami .458 … Atlanta .454
Detroit .447 … Colorado .447 … San Diego .444… Chicago White Sox .432 … Philadelphia .429 … Minnesota .417 … Cincinnati .411
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Jerry Tapp
Jerry Tapp is a freelance writer from Racine, WI with a major concentration on sports statistics and numbers that define sports teams and players. He began his foray into sports stats-focused writing as a regular contributor to the “Numbers” column in Inside Sports magazine in the mid-1980’s and then began writing a weekly “Stats on Tapp” column for the Racine Journal Times. That column was eventually nationally syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate. He later wrote sports stats items for the Washington Post under the “Stat of the Day” heading. After launching his blog, www.statsontapp.com in 2011, Jerry turned his sports stats attention to sports websites. He wrote regularly for Bleacher Report, BallHyped, football.com and Heavy.com. Today he keeps busy writing weekly columns of stats-centric articles for three sports websites, Today’s Pigskin (NFL), Today’s Knuckleball (MLB) and Today’s Fastbreak (NBA), and as a monthly contributor to the Milwaukee Brewers “GameDay” publication that is distributed to fans attending games at Miller Park.