How Bad is it? A Royals Pursuit of the Postseason

Most of #Royals twitter has already written this team off. In our various interactions with fans about … well, any topic really, the theme of "Sell, Sell, Sell!!!" most frequently arises.

Here we sit on June 5th and a large portion of the fans have already given up on the season (what year is this again?). Is there any hope? Are we past the point of no return?

If one were to average the lowest win totals of teams to make the playoffs in the AL over the past 5 years (which was 4 times the second WC and once the AL Central winner), he or she would land on a minimum target 88.6 wins. Now, the peripheral rules of baseball have been tweaked pretty heavily over the past decade, but I’m relatively sure a team can’t win .6 of a game. Coupled with the current AL East log jam, I’ll go ahead and round that up to 89.

89 wins. That’s the realistic target needed to achieve an AL postseason berth in the 2 Wild Card team era.

So how bad is that for the Royals? Well, pretty darn bad. Even with a winning May (albeit barely, at 15-14), the Royals find themselves with a 24-31 record at more or less the third-of-the-season mark.

There are 107 games left. Even my rudimentary math skills deduce this means they need 65 wins to get to the 89 mark. A few more clicks on the old abacus tell me this would require a 65-42 record the rest of the season. Some fancy fractions I learned in 4^th grade tell me that equates to a .646 winning percentage. And a last bit of highfalutin’ reasoning leads me to the conclusion that our boys in blue essentially need to take 2 of every 3 the rest of the season.

To be honest, I was legitimately surprised by that number. That's still a hell of a feat, but I would have guessed we were in even worse shape.

Is it possible? Absolutely.

Likely? I wouldn’t bet on it.

Time to sell off pending Free Agents? Not quite yet, unless someone blows your doors off with an offer.

The Royals have certainly given themselves one hell of a hill to climb. But this fan is willing to keep my hands and feet inside of the ride for at least a little while longer.