No matter how many games it entails, a short Chicago Cubs regular season schedule will create chaos and hurt the odds of the team making the postseason.
It surely won’t be 162. It might be 100. It might be none at all. Regardless of how many regular season games the Chicago Cubs play in 2020, having a shorter schedule will decrease the chance that there’s postseason baseball in Wrigleyville this fall.
Here’s some good news though, it’s not just the Cubs whose playoff chances decline due to the shorter season.
The St. Louis Cardinals, Washington Nationals, Minnesota Twins, and even powerhouse teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees will all see their playoff odds go down due to the abbreviated schedule.
Here’s why: In a normal, 162-game season, it often takes quite some time for the better teams to really put some distance in the standings between themselves and the teams that aren’t in contention that year. The shorter the season is, the less time that the good teams will have to separate themselves from lesser teams, especially those who may overperform or get off to a hot start.
To get a better idea of what I’m talking about, let’s look at an example.
Let’s say that the 2020 MLB regular season starts on June 1st and the teams play the rest of their games as scheduled from that point forward, making no adjustments from the original calendar. For the Cubs, that means they’d play 102 regular season games in 2020.
In 2019, the Cubs played their 102nd game of the season on July 24th. After that game, their record was 55-47, putting them half of a game ahead of the Cardinals in the division. The Milwaukee Brewers were two games back, the Cincinnati Reds were eight games back, and the Pittsburgh Pirates were eight and a half games back.
At that point, the three frontrunners in the division had clearly emerged and separated themselves from the bottom of the pack, but that wasn’t the case throughout the rest of the league.
In the National League on July 24th, the Philadelphia Phillies were 54-48. They would finish the season 81-81. The San Francisco Giants were 52-51. They ended the year with a 77-85 record.
As of July 24th, both the Phillies and Giants were within three games of a Wild Card spot. At the end of the season, they’d both finish at least eight games back.