Today is May 5th. Most teams in baseball have played right around 30 games, which puts us a little less than one-fifth of the way through the season.
I dug through the past two-plus decades (every season this century, minus the Covid 2020 season) to see how relevant the standings on May 5 were to the rest of the season. Here are the quick takeaways from those 22 seasons:
- 61 of the 132 (46.2%) of the division leaders on May 5 were the full season division winners.
- Not a single May 5 had the exact same division winners as the end of the season. In fact, not a single May 5 had even five of the same division winners, but four shared winners was relatively common.
- Here was the breakdown:'
- 1 shared winner – 2 of 22
- 2 shared winners – 6 of 22
- 3 shared winners – 9 of 22
- 4 shared winners – 5 of 22
- The biggest comeback from May 5 to end of season this century was the 2006 Minnesota Twins who were nine games back on May 5 but came back to win the AL Central, but they were not an anomaly, the 2005 Yankees were eight games back, and there were numerous teams seven games back as of May 5.
Let's keep those in mind while we go division-by-division through baseball on May 5, 2023, and look for actionable bets. For each division, I have included a couple charts with other key factors to weigh in our betting process.'
The current standings are central of course, but I have included a few other columns. Pythagorean wins are based on a team's run differential and are typically more predictive than standard wins and losses, especially early in a season. BaseRuns wins are in a similar mold, but are centered around how teams have done with runners on base both in terms of scoring and preventing those runners from scoring. Those terms are both linked for full definitions.