How Many Wins Captures the 3rd NL Wild Card?

The National League Wild Card race continues to be a relatively tightly bunched affair. That said, there has also been some separation taking place over the last couple of weeks as the San Diego Padres and St. Louis Cardinals have gotten hot.

Meanwhile, the San Francisco Giants edged ahead of the Arizona Diamondbacks Friday night and the New York Mets moved into a virtual tie with Arizona. Here is what the standings look like through the games of July 5th.

It's impossible to accurately project which teams will stay hot and which will collapse. The purpose of this article is not to project the Wild Card winners, but to figure out what the "magic number" of wins is likely to be to capture that third Wild Card Spot. So as not to bury the lead too deep in the article, our projection is it will take a minimum of 84 Wins to secure a Postseason berth.

From the Diamondbacks' perspective, with their 43-45 record, that means they'd need to go 41-33 the rest of the way to capture the 3rd Wild Card spot again. That coincidentally is the same win total they got in with last year.

So how did we arrive at that projection?

The first and simplest way to look at this would be to just extrapolate the Cardinals' .529 W% to 162 games. Doing so comes out to 85.6 Wins. As the D-backs would need to win at least one more game than the Cardinals to get in, then the target becomes 86 games using this method.

A better way to view this however is via the projection websites, including Baseball Reference, Fangraphs, and Baseball Prospectus' "Pecota" projections. Using the averages of those three sites projected standings I created the following table. The win total is the focus here, more than the team.

As teams can't win partial games in real life, we need to round off of course. Using this table we can then say it will take 88-89 wins to capture the first Wild Card spot, 86-87 for the second, and 83-84 for the third. None of the projection systems see the third Wild Card winner, whoever it is, achieving 86 wins.

The lowest range of win total total needed to get in is 82. That projection comes from Baseball Reference which uses run differential over a team's last 100 games as the foundation for their calculations. The Reds have a +20 run differential this season. It's notable the Reds have the only positive run differential of any team below the Padres in the first standings table above.

In other words the Baseball Reference projections don't think any of the teams below the Padres are likely to win more than one game above a .500 record. However when we take the average of the three systems we arrive at 83.4 Wins.

We could have taken the lower number, 83, however once we consider tie-breakers, which are head to head records and then divisional records, we decided to err on the high side of the decimal point, thus 84 wins.

One last table. This shows what the Diamondbacks remaining win-loss would need to be to get to each win total. The extreme ends of this table are in grey to represent the extremely low odds that it takes as high as 88 or as low as 81 to get in.

Going eight game over .500 the rest of the way would be much better than the projection systems think the Diamondbacks will achieve. The range of the projections is now between 80-82 wins, or about .500 the rest of the way. But beating the projections by a handful of games is certainly well within the error bars in these projections.

It's notable that the highest peak over .500 the Diamondbacks reached last year at any point was 16 games. While it's always possible they could go on another such run, with the current state of their starting pitching injuries, that doesn't seem likely.

At some point the Diamondbacks are going to have to go on a decent run and get to 6 games or more over. 500 to get into the Postseason. They're highly unlike to squeak in with a .500 record or just a couple of games above.