Numbers Don't Lie
Sabermetrics Deep Dive
On the morning of October 5, with two days and three games left between the two contenders, the Rick Astleys were not in first place. They had lost six straight. They had scored sixteen runs in those six games. They had gone into Huanca and been swept, then lost a fifteen-inning game in Nicaragua in which they scored twice in the top of the fourteenth and still walked off the field beaten. Iron Knob, which sat six games back when Column 17 went to press on August 25, was half a game ahead.
Forty-eight hours later the Astleys had their pennant—104-50, one game clear—and the club that delivered it to them was Fugging, a team that had been mathematically eliminated three days earlier and had nothing left to play for but pride. That is the 2026 WLB regular season in one sentence: the best team by every underlying measure nearly gave it away, the second-best team by every underlying measure nearly took it, and the final push came from a fifth-place club beating Greg Maddux on the last afternoon of the year.
On the night of September 27, after the Astleys took the opener of the Knockemstiff series 6-3, the lead was three and a half games with seven to play for Rick Astleys and seven for Iron Knob. Nobody in either clubhouse thought it was over. Nobody thought it was close, either.
What followed was a collapse and a near-miss compressed into nine days. The Astleys went 0-6 from September 28 through October 4, scoring 2.7 runs per game against a season rate of 6.1, and allowing 32 runs while doing it. Knockemstiff came into the Astleys' own park and took two of three. Huanca swept three in its own park. Iron Knob, meanwhile, went 10-2 in its twelve banked computer games and closed the gap to half a game.
Then October 4 in Nicaragua, a fifteen-inning game that deserves its own paragraph. Tom Candiotti went nine innings and left with a 2-2 tie. Roger Clemens matched him into the seventh. The bullpens traded zeros through the thirteenth. In the top of the fourteenth the Astleys broke through with two runs. In the bottom half Roberto Alomar doubled home two to tie it. In the fifteenth, Tony Pena drove in the winner off David Wells. Fifteen innings, 470 pitches between the two staffs, and the Astleys went to bed out of first place.
What the Astleys did next is what good teams do. On October 5, down 4-2 in the fifth, they scored four times on a Ken Caminiti double, a Damon Berryhill infield single and a fielder's choice, and Glenn Davis homered in the ninth for insurance. Ken Howell went eight. On October 6, the lineup put four on Bob Welch in the first inning—Mark Grace, Eric Davis, Randy Milligan and Joe Orsulak hit back-to-back-to-back for extra bases—and Scott Garrelts went eight for his twentieth win. The run that turned out to be the margin came in the ninth on a bases-loaded walk to Lou Whitaker.
Meanwhile, in Iron Knob, Fugging's Mike Moore went eight innings, Jack Clark and Dwight Evans homered off Maddux in the first, and Jeff Montgomery got his 28th save. Final: Fugging 4, Iron Knob 2. The pennant was decided by a team that had been eliminated for three days.
Strip out the computer games and Iron Knob was the better team against human competition this year: 65-45 to the Astleys' 64-46. Iron Knob also won the head-to-head series, 13-9. If you want to argue that the Explosions were the best team in the league in the games that told you the most, you have the numbers on your side.
But the run differential tells the other story, and it is not close. The Astleys outscored opponents by 346 runs; Iron Knob by 228. Pythagoras says a +346 team wins 110 games, and the Astleys won 104—roughly six wins short of their run differential, the largest shortfall of any contender. Iron Knob, at +228, projects to 100 wins and won 103. So the most accurate one-line description of this pennant race is this: the Astleys were the better team and the Explosions were the luckier one, and the better team won by one game anyway.
The Astleys' edge came from the computer column, 40-4 against Iron Knob's 38-6. Both numbers are outstanding. The difference between them is the pennant.
Garth Graham's club finished the year 9-1 over its last ten games, including eight straight wins, and the temptation is to say Fugging came up just short. That reading gets the cause and effect backwards. The streak was real, and it was also scheduled: all eight wins came against Panama City Beach and Oak Ridge. Fugging did exactly what a contender is supposed to do against the computer, went 38-6 on the year, and never got the chance to do anything in that stretch that would actually move a human opponent.
The deficit is where the story is. On August 25, Fugging trailed Huanca by four games for the last playoff spot. On September 21 the Wankers came into Fugging's park and won 8-0, and when the night was over the gap was six and a half. From there Fugging won five straight against the computers while Huanca went 2-3, and six and a half became three and a half. And then Huanca swept the Astleys at home from October 1 through 3, Fugging could only match it by beating Panama City Beach three times, and the door closed. When the Wankers won on October 3 they reached 86 wins, and Fugging's ceiling with two games left was 85.
The real problem shows up in two places. First, Fugging went 8-13 against human teams after August 25—worse than anyone in the race except Nicaragua. Second, Fugging went 7-15 against Huanca for the season. That is an eight-game swing in the head-to-head alone, against a team that finished three games ahead. You cannot lose fifteen of twenty-two to the club you are chasing and make it up against computers in the last week.
Underneath that is a rotation problem the bullpen could not cover. Larry Andersen (1.77 ERA, 85 strikeouts against 15 walks), Bob McClure, Bill Landrum and Montgomery made up one of the best relief groups in the league. But Bruce Hurst (6.14), Kirk McCaskill (5.97), Doug Drabek (5.36) and Mike Bielecki (5.50) turned in quality starts at rates between 28 and 37 percent, and the staff as a whole posted a .351 quality-start rate—worst among the six human clubs by a wide margin. Fugging's 84 wins matched its Pythagorean projection almost exactly. Nothing was unlucky here. The team was what its run differential said it was, and that was a fifth-place team that got hot when the schedule turned soft.
Give Fugging this, though: on the last day of the season, with nothing at stake, Moore and Montgomery beat Maddux and decided the pennant. Some clubs mail in October 6. This one didn't.