By Brian Joura September 13, 2020
It used to be that you talked about a team’s performance with runners in scoring position and people’s eyes would glaze over. And then 2016 happened, when for nearly five months out of the season, the Mets had the worst performance in the category since the expansion Padres in 1969. Then people started taking notice. Earlier this year, it was a common refrain to point out how poorly the Mets were doing in this split.
The 2020 version of this is a team’s record in blowout games compared to its overall record. Conventional wisdom is that good teams win the close ones. And as a general rule of thumb, they do. But you’ll always find multiple teams with winning records who finish below .500 in one-run games. It turns out luck plays a significant role in these games, too. But if you want to see a mark of a team’s quality, you should check out their mark in blowout games, defined as ones with a margin of five runs or greater.
The 2019 Nationals, the team that won the World Series, won 93 games during the regular season, yet were 17-21 in one-run games. But they were 29-19 in blowouts. That’s just one example. Let’s look at all of the clubs in 2019-2020 and see what their records were in blowouts. While this is just a partial season, it will still give us a 60-team sample.
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