The All-Star break has always been considered the halfway point of the baseball season, but the fact remains that every team has played more than half of their games a week earlier. A more accurate marker of the midpoint of the Major League Baseball season would be July 4.
Here alone, in 2016, every team has played at least 83 games, with most hitting their nineties before the All-Star break. Two clubs, the Toronto Blue Jays and the San Francisco Giants, have already played 85 games. By the Midsummer Classic next Tuesday at Petco Park in San Diego, both teams will have completed nearly 60 percent of their seasons.
The Fourth might be a better indication of midseason, but it provides a very inaccurate picture of which teams will be champions of their divisions. Rarely do the teams in first place on Independence Day end up there at the end of the season.
In the past five seasons, only nine division champions have held the top spot on July 4. The other twenty-one division champions were looking for at least one other team in the midpoint, with some even as far down as fourth place.
In 2012, neither of the teams in first place in the Fourth managed to win their division. Even more incredible, four of the eventual division champions (Detroit, Atlanta, Oakland, and Baltimore) were in third place by the middle of that season.
The trade at the bottom happens less frequently, but still more than half of the teams in last place on July 4 end up in the basement at the end of the season. Of the thirty clubs that have placed last on the Fourth of July over the past five seasons, seventeen have gone up at least one notch in their divisions.
For three of those seasons, exactly half couldn’t get out of the basement. But just two seasons ago, the bottom six at the midpoint finished ahead of at least one club in their divisions.
Most likely, the clubs that are on top on July 4th will likely be replaced at the end of the season. That fact should change the way clubs have traditionally viewed the baseball schedule.
Instead of waiting until the All-Star break in mid-July, the teams’ front offices should start preparing for the second half at least a week earlier. The teams in first place right now have less chance of finishing on top than one of the teams currently chasing them, a scary thought for GMs who have so far considered 2016 a successful season.
