The Rockies Then & Now

For the second time in three years, the Colorado Rockies are back from the dead. On June 1st, the Rockies were 20-29 with roughly 2% odds of making the playoffs per Coolstandings.com. A few days later the Rockies would start a streak of 11 straight wins and after dropping one to the Rays, would win their next six. That’s 17 victories in 18 games. Even if you assume the Rockies are a true talent 60% wins team – and they aren’t, but bare with me – and ran the odds of winning 17 games in 18 tries through a binomial distribution, you would arrive with odds of 0.01%.

So yeah, for one of the best teams in baseball there was a chance of such a run, but the odds are lower for the Rockies because we know they aren’t a team you’d expect to win 97 games. Call the run odds-defying, the Rockies did something similar in 2007 when they won 13 of 14 before downing the Padres in a tiebreaker playoff. The difference is that team’s charge came much later than their present-day brethren. Below you will see CoolStanding’s playoff odds from both years with the games played total on the x-axis. Both teams were down on their luck and up on their October tee times around the 40-45 game mark, they also seem to begin the hike around the 80-100 game mark.

The graph is cut off a bit near the end, but the worthwhile part to take from game 160’s odds is that the Rockies are currently above those odds, which were amongst the highest of their entire season. That is to say, the Rockies are in better playoff condition now than they were for most of 2007.