The 2026 baseball season is rapidly approaching, with less than two weeks until pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training. For fans, this is usually the time of year dominated by “What if?” and “Who’s next?” We argue over roster spots and projected win totals, trying to predict the unpredictable.
But as we transition into a new season, it’s worth stepping back and examining the actual mechanics, rhythms, and characteristics of a 162-game MLB season. To understand what we are about to watch, we first have to understand the instrument itself.
An Organic Evolution: America’s Summertime Rhythm
The 162-game schedule isn’t a historical accident or a dusty relic of the radio era. It is an organic evolution, shaped by how the sport is played and how it has always been consumed.
Unlike other sports built around scarcity and once-a-week spectacles, baseball evolved as a daily cadence. The three-game series, the local club, the routine of checking in night after night — these weren’t design flaws. They were features. The series is the smallest unit that allows variance to breathe.
Biomechanically, baseball’s lower per-game intensity made daily repetition possible. Culturally, that repetition turned the game into America’s summertime rhythm — a steady presence that doesn’t demand full attention all at once, but instead provides a continuous signal over six months.
The Truth in the Volume: A Variance-Resolution Machine
Why 162 games? Because baseball is a high-variance, low-intensity (per game) sport that requires an enormous sample size just to know what’s true.
In short bursts, luck — or ignition — can win. Over 162 games, the random bounces, weather effects, and late-inning bloops eventually flatten out. The season functions as a variance-resolution machine.
Variance doesn’t fade gradually. It collapses. That collapse is the Variance Cliff.
A .300 hitter still fails 70% of the time. Even an elite .400 OBP player fails 60% of the time. Baseball is a game of constant failure, and the marathon isn’t designed to avoid it — it’s designed to exhaust luck until only structural reality remains.
The Three Buckets of a Season
Every year, regardless of team quality, the 162 games naturally settle into three analytical buckets. These aren’t precise league constants, but they’re remarkably stable year to year and extremely useful for diagnosis. For simplicity, think of a 30 / 30 / 40 split:
One-Run Games (≈30%)
Roughly 48–50 games. This is the coin-flip bucket, dominated by late-inning variance.Blowouts (5+ Runs) (≈30%)
Another 48–50 games. This is the separation bucket, where talent gaps and system dominance show up most clearly.Competitive Games (2–4 Runs) (≈40%)
About 65 games per season. This is the grind — the largest segment and the true test of roster depth, execution, and organizational health.
Successful vs. Unsuccessful Seasons
The difference between a playoff-competitive team and a non-playoff team isn’t just the final record. It’s how the team performs inside these buckets.
The key insight isn’t the blowouts or the coin flips.
It’s the Competitive Middle.
Notice where the widest separation lives: games where neither team ever pulls away.
Why the Competitive Middle Is the Diagnostic Core
Blowouts are about talent. You can win them because your ace dominates or your star hits two home runs.
One-run games are about variance. Even elite teams rarely sustain high winning percentages in these without luck.
The Competitive Middle is different.
These games are won because your fourth starter gives you six innings, your middle relief bridges the gap, and your lineup executes without relying on heroics. A three-run lead in the seventh inning isn’t a coin flip. It’s a test of structure and process.
If the season is a variance-resolution machine, the middle 40% is its primary filter.
The “So What”: Why the Season Demands a Grind-Capable Roster
If the 162-game season is a variance-resolution machine, then the Competitive Middle is where that machine actually does its work.
Blowouts reveal talent ceilings. One-run games magnify luck. But the 2–4 run games — the middle 40% of the season — are where rosters are stress-tested for structural integrity. These games don’t reward brilliance or magic. They reward depth, redundancy, and mistake tolerance.
This is where the idea of a system-complete roster matters.
A grind-capable roster doesn’t need everything to go right. It needs the capacity to absorb what inevitably goes wrong — a short start from the fourth starter, a middle-relief arm having an off week, a lineup that has to win without its stars carrying the night. In the Competitive Middle, teams win because the system can survive a mistake without cascading into failure.
This is also where seasons quietly unravel.
When the Competitive Middle collapses, the roster turns into a consumptive sink. Losses stop being isolated events and begin to compound. The team is forced to win nearly every coin-flip one-run game just to stay afloat — a biological and statistical impossibility over six months. This is how competitive seasons become survival tests.
The core takeaway isn’t that elite talent doesn’t matter. It’s that talent alone can’t carry the grind. Over 162 games, the season demands a roster built not just for upside, but for durability under continuous stress.
That’s the lens this series will use to evaluate 2026 — not whether the Mets can reach a theoretical ceiling, but whether they are finally constructed to avoid the structural failures that have undone recent seasons.
The Competitive Middle as the Floor
Playoff teams use the Competitive Middle as their floor.
In the 101-win 2022 season, the Mets won .645 of these games. In the unsuccessful 2023 season, that number collapsed to .406.
Strong teams don’t need everything to break right in one-run games to survive. They consistently win enough of the 2–4 run grinds that a bad week of coin flips doesn’t derail the season. They “gate” losses, typically staying above .500 in all three buckets at the same time.
That’s the difference between noise and structure.
What Comes Next
As we get closer to Opening Day, this series will return to these three buckets repeatedly — not to judge streaks or early standings, but to diagnose how the 2026 roster absorbs stress across a full season.
In April, the standings often just reflect which way the coin flipped.
The truth of a baseball season takes much longer to show its face.
Ok, great topic, but in the chart it shows a greater variance in the one run games than the two-four run games. Also, a truly good team minimizes mistakes and takes advantage of the other team’s mistakes to pull out a victory. That’s what truly makes a season great!
ReplyDeleteLast year we lamented Soto’s solo homeruns. Why doesn’t he hit them with men in base? Well, sometimes it’s harder to homer with men on because a pitcher bares down, but other than Soto, no one had a really good on base average. That hurts when you are trying to maximize runs.
But back to the article, I understand that the 40% will be 2-4 run games and I feel that a fly ball that dies on the warning track means just as much in those games as in one run games. After all, winning teams find a way to win those games and losing teams find a way to lose them. If your premise that a 162 game season counters luck, how can you then not give due to the teams that win the one run games but rather call it luck? To me the fundamentally sound teams that don't beat themselves are usually very successful in those one run games and those teams are usually on top of the division.
Gus, This is a really thoughtful comment, and I think we’re closer than it might look on the surface.
DeleteI don’t mean to suggest that one-run games are pure luck or that fundamentally sound teams don’t outperform sloppy ones in those situations. Over time, they absolutely do at the margins.
The distinction I’m trying to make is more about signal-to-noise than skill vs luck.
One-run games tend to be where variance overwhelms structure fastest. (Ie, In a one-run game, the margin is so thin that almost anything can decide it.) Even very good teams rarely sustain extreme success there year to year. That doesn’t mean execution doesn’t matter, just that it’s harder to separate repeatable process from short-term outcomes in that bucket.
The 2–4 run games are interesting to me because they sit in between: enough stress to expose flaws, but enough distance from the ninth-inning coin flip that roster depth, bullpen layering, and lineup quality show up more consistently.
I actually think your Soto/OBP point fits this perfectly. Teams that get on base more and avoid empty-calorie solo shots tend to stay out of the one-run bucket more often. In that sense, winning the Competitive Middle is often about preventing games from becoming coin flips in the first place.
Really appreciate the comment. This series is meant to explore exactly these fault lines, not close the case early.
I follow. But, I’m liking this thought exercise and want to continue. I’m not expecting you to do more work nor am I trying to be a smart ass, but to me a four run difference is pretty big. It’s still “one swing of the bat”, but the difference between a 5-1 or 6-2 score is quite a bit better than 5-2 or even 4-2, especially as the game is into the late innings. I believe on the MLB app, under standings, they show records for one run games and also for two run games. To your point, I have seen a team have a losing record in one run games and be in first place (Cleveland), but they get bounced quickly in the playoffs because they are obviously pretty hollow.
DeleteHowever, if I’m building a roster I would prefer as many OBP guys as I can get to create stress on the other team and have their pitchers always working hard. Give me the low scoring games because if my team is fundamentally sound. We will win most of them and in the playoffs that’s how games are played, and we will have played them all year.
This is where the discussion gets really interesting, because I think we’re now talking less about score margins and more about what we’re optimizing for.
DeleteYou’re right that four runs feels very different than two, especially late. The buckets aren’t meant to imply those games are identical experiences, just that they tend to behave similarly when you look at how often roster depth, sequencing, and bullpen layering decide the outcome versus a single late moment.
Where I think we may be slightly diverging is on the role of the regular season itself.
Your OBP-first, stress-the-opponent approach is exactly how playoff games are won. October compresses variance. Every run matters, every baserunner matters, and fundamentally sound teams tend to surface.
The regular season, though, is a different environment. It’s long enough that the biggest risk isn’t losing a close game, it’s becoming fragile. Teams that live constantly in low-margin games often need everything to go right just to stay afloat. Over six months, that can turn into exhaustion or cascading failure.
So when I focus on the Competitive Middle, it’s less about avoiding close games entirely and more about asking: can this roster create just enough separation, often enough, that a bad bullpen week or a cold stretch doesn’t force them to be perfect every night?
I actually think the ideal team does both:
wins the grind during the summer and is comfortable in tight games when October arrives.
Really enjoying this exchange. These are exactly the tradeoffs worth unpacking as we think about what kind of Mets team we’re actually trying to build.
This post was large
ReplyDelete