.500

The good chance of a winning season is one of the reasons I'm filled with irrational exuberance about the 2005 team. Jim Molony frames the upcoming year as one in which the team could make a run at .500. Low expectations are a good thing since they are more rarely disappointed.

But taking any given ballclub and forecasting a .500 season strikes me as an always-conservative enterprise. It's akin to predicting an NFL team will score 17 to 21 points. Or projecting that Average Man will lose most of what he brought during his weekend at Vegas. Or predicting that it will be very cold on New Year's Day. A team has to be pretty wretched to not have at least a 45%-55% of finishing at .500. That's my sense of it.

The current team is not wretched so again I'd handicap their chances of a .500 season at something like 50-50. Over the last twelve years or so, maybe there have been four or five teams that weren't wretched at the start of the year. The fact that none of them finished above .500 is unfortunate but no great improbability. A quarter can come up heads five times in a row. That kind of improbability happens every day. It's easy to be a fatalist and think that the team didn't reach .500 in all of those years because those teams never had a chance of reaching .500. But my experience as a sporting fan rejects that logic. To me, that's like losing twelve straight hands of blackjack and chalking it up to your genetics. It's an overreaction to what probably included some usual dose of ill luck.

I also thought that the team underperformed in 2004. Injuries, a cruel schedule, and unexpected extremities of performance added to a sense of anxiety that appeared, to me, to prolong the losing streaks. Every sub-.500 team can say that. If the rotation stays reasonably healthy and if we aren't watching the likes of Nelson Figueroa come September, I think it's no great feat of irrational optimism to expect something close to a .500 season. If the horses are healthy and the team looks game at the end of March, I'll probably forecast something like 85 wins. As Ty Wigginton would reason, they're due.