The Concept

Many sports fans who don't care for baseball love to harp on how long the MLB season is. 162 games. That's a lot of freggin games. It seems like way too much. And I agree, it does seem like way too much. However, I think a 162 game season is perfectly reasonable and perfectly justified, given the nature of the sport of baseball. 

Consider the NFL. The NFL season is only 16 games long. But given the nature of football, you can properly judge a team based on how they perform over 16 games. Hell, you can actually make a lot of reasonable judgments based on one football game. But baseball is much different because of the nature of the sport. When you have 5 different starting pitchers, and when hitters are considered successful when they succeed 30 percent of the time, one game doesn't tell you anything. Neither does 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 games really tell you anything. You can only judge a baseball team based on how they perform over relatively long stretches of time. 

Given the nature of the sports, I would contend that 10 games of baseball is the equivalent of 1 game of football. In 10 games, your 5 starting pitchers have completed two starts, and your regulars have had roughly 40 at-bats each. These numbers give you something to work with, about as much as 1 game of football gives you to work with when you're judging football players. If you agree with me on this, then you should agree that 162 games is perfectly reasonable, because 162 games is 10 games 16 times (with only 2 left over). So a baseball season, like a football season, is - in a way - 16 games; 16 stretches in which you can make reasonable judgments about players and teams. 

Obviously, a baseball team should try to win every game, even knowing that going 162-0 is impossible. But a baseball team is successful when it goes 6-4 per every stretch of 10 games. Now, 6-4 sounds good, but perhaps not dazzlingly good. However, if a team wins 6 out of every 10 games, it will finish the season with 97 wins, which is pretty damn good these days. 

So the way I see it, every time a baseball team goes 6-4 or better over 10 games, it should be considered a win. If it goes 4-6 or worse, a loss. 5-5 is a tie. 

After every 10 games, I will bring you "The Mets 10-Game Report". Obviously, there will be 16 installments of the Report. It will include a recap of the 10 games under review, stats, analysis, random other thoughts, and some brief stuff on how other relevant teams have done over the 10 games in question. It's going to be awesome. 

Here's a sample of what it looked like last year: http://trippingac.blogspot.com/2008/09/mets-10-game-report-volume-14.html

I have decided to create a separate blog for it this year.