it is hard to make up five games

the cubs won again yesterday afternoon, but i'll admit that i barely watch them anymore. they've now gone 10-4 over their last fourteen -- and you'd think that would make any cub fan watch. they've been virtually the hottest team in baseball over that run.

except that they haven't quite been the hottest team in baseball. in fact, they haven't quite been the hottest team in their division. since june 12, the day the cubs' recent good fortune really started, the milwaukee brewers have gone a stunning 12-2 to actually expand their lead on the cubs from 5.5 to 7.5 games. and they've done it in more impressive style to boot -- while the cubs have scored 62 and allowed 56, the brewers' like figures are 96 and 53. i've found myself fangraphing the brewers far more than the cubs, which is i suppose the 21st-century equivalent of scoreboard watching. i missed a lot of cub games in 1998 by standing in the back of the rightfield bleachers facing the wrong way.

i said this a few times earlier this year and it bears repeating: five games is a lot farther than you think it is. and that is counterintuitively more true for long stretches of games than short ones.

remember all that five back business? the only other team in the sample to fall out five so quickly as this club and even get to .500 was the 1993 team. they were 38-38 at this point, and fell to 64-70 on september 2.

that club went 16-4 from there to september 24, going from six under .500 to six over. that's the kind of spell it's going to take for the cubs to get even close in this thing.

and that wasn't enough, of course. if you presume the current divisional setup, the '93 club would have been -- even after all that -- still 14.5 games short of the wild card phillies, and 3.5 short of the division-leading cardinals having been 9.5 back on september 2.

more comprehensively -- if you examine every other club in the nl over that 20-game stretch, what was the net change against the cubs over that run?

	September 3-24						thru September 2
	W	L	GB	WP	RS	RA	W	L	GB	WP
CHC	16	4	0.0	0.800	121	91	64	70	22.5	0.478
ATL	15	5	1.0	0.750	104	53	83	51	3.5	0.619
MON	14	5	1.5	0.737	94	88	74	60	12.5	0.552
COL	15	6	1.5	0.714	142	100	50	84	36.5	0.373
LAD	12	9	4.5	0.571	82	83	67	65	18.5	0.508
PHI	11	9	5.0	0.550	107	85	83	50	3.0	0.624
SFG	10	10	6.0	0.500	83	68	86	47	0.0	0.647
STL	10	10	6.0	0.500	120	110	73	60	13.0	0.549
HOU	9	12	7.5	0.429	82	82	70	63	16.0	0.526
PIT	7	12	8.5	0.368	82	90	63	71	23.5	0.470
FLA	6	14	10.0	0.300	50	85	56	77	30.0	0.421
SDP	6	14	10.0	0.300	65	102	53	81	33.5	0.396
NYM	5	14	10.5	0.263	65	99	47	87	39.5	0.351
CIN	4	16	12.0	0.200	74	135	66	69	21.0	0.489

this is a table of the 1993 national league, with their records from september 3 to 24 broken out, sorted by their performance over that span. the cubs are highlighted blue, and all the teams that were worse than they were year-to-date through september 2 are highlighted in yellow.

when lightning struck out of the clear blue and the cubs went on a tear, they gained ground on everyone. but how much they gained had a great deal to do with how bad the object club was. five of the other six sub-.500 clubs fell back by 8.5 games or more. but the good clubs -- the ones that had been over .500 for the whole year beforehand -- continued either to win or at least tread water. as a result, even going 16-4 narrowed the gap by more than five games against just three of the seven clubs that had been above breakeven.

moreover, even this gain is illusory because it encompasses a sample designed not to make the league look normal but to make the cubs look really good. let's expand the sample by a week on either side -- going from august 26 to october 1.

	Aug 26-Oct 1						thru Aug 26
	W	L	GB	WP	RS	RA	W	L	GB	WP
MON	25	7	-4.5	0.781	167	123	68	60	15.5	0.531
ATL	23	9	-2.5	0.719	178	104	79	49	4.5	0.617
CHC	21	12	0.0	0.636	174	157	62	65	21.0	0.488
COL	19	13	1.5	0.594	189	169	48	80	35.5	0.375
SFG	19	14	2.0	0.576	145	118	83	44	0.0	0.654
PHI	17	16	4.0	0.515	176	156	80	47	3.0	0.630
HOU	16	17	5.0	0.485	142	128	68	59	15.0	0.535
STL	16	17	5.0	0.485	167	169	69	58	14.0	0.543
LAD	15	19	6.5	0.441	128	150	65	61	17.5	0.516
PIT	14	19	7.0	0.424	143	151	60	67	23.0	0.472
NYM	13	20	8.0	0.394	118	149	44	83	39.0	0.346
SDP	11	22	10.0	0.333	134	169	49	78	34.0	0.386
FLA	11	22	10.0	0.333	95	150	53	74	30.0	0.417
CIN	9	22	11.0	0.290	136	199	63	66	21.0	0.488

now the cubs have actually lost ground to a couple teams, and gained more than five games on only one of the seven good clubs. and if you continued to expand the sample, in general you'd find that the cubs' performance against the part of the field that was better than they were going into the period including the win streak gets worse and worse -- until the number of games in the sample gets about as large as the number of games outside it.

the longer the stretch of games that the cubs have to outperform their betters, the less likely it is that they can. as i said above, they've scored 62 and allowed 56 in this last run, outperforming their pythagorean estimate by more than two wins. the karmically-inclined can consider it a bit of payback for the underperformance from april. the cubs have been exceedingly lucky to lose just two games to the brewers in these last fourteen, though the brewers are finding out the converse of this argument -- it's also hard to add five games to a lead.

anyway, the upshot is that good luck isn't made to last -- but when it's all you've got, you have to pray for more. john dooley in the comments complained yesterday that the team would have to win 20 in a row to make up ground. turns out that isn't far off -- so go sit in your church, spin a prayer wheel or stick a note in an old wall, per your preference. it can't hurt.