The Mets fold, but it was a long time coming

Well, the National League is still not quite set. We ended up in scenario #11 below: the Mets lost and the Phillies won, givng the NL East title to Philadelphia, and the Padres lost and the Rockies won, meaning that there will be a playoff tomorrow for the NL Wild Card.

Fot the Mets, losing today was the culmination of their end-of-season choke, what's being referred to as one of the biggest collapses in the history of baseball. They were 7 games up with 17 to play, and they lost the division without even landing in the Wild Card for compensation. For Mets fans, it's a day of very great disappointment, because the team had looked so good at the beginning of the year, and had held the division lead for 135 days straight. But if I had been paying attention to the right stats, I should have seen it coming. Because I track games above or below .500, instead of winning percentage, I missed this indicator that by the third month of the season all was not well at Shea:


The Red Sox took the same kind of dive as the Mets did, at about the same time, but they started from a better position, didn't drop down so badly, and then managed to right themselves sufficiently to hold on to their position. Even so, their dive allowed the Yankees, who improved their play in almost every month, to come back from 14 games back to win the Wild Card and end up only two games back of Boston.

The Mets' dive was deeper, and they never recovered from it, playing above .500 in only one of their last 4 months, and that allowed the only-slightly-better-than-mediocre Phillies to win the division The Mets problems didn't come at the end of the season really, that's only when it was most apparent because of the pressure being applied by Philadelphia; in reality, the Mets had begun to play poorly less than half-way through the season. [Removed unfair characterization.]

Update: Biggest Baseball Collapses