Does a rough second half matter in October? Some World Series hopefuls might want to look away

For more than three months this season, the Phillies and Guardians owned the two best records in the sport. Then baseball happened.

On July 1, they were both on 100-win paces. Now, as that standings chart illustrates so vividly, they’ve spent the past two months playing more like an 80-win team than a 100-win team. Funny how that happens. The question is, what does it mean for their win-the-World-Series aspirations?

They’re not the first teams in history to discover how long a baseball season really is. But that isn’t the story here.

The story is: A rough second half, for teams like this, often means more than you’d probably guess it means. I’ve done the math so you don’t have to.

The wild-card era is 30 seasons old now. You’d think the wild-card safety net would have given many teams the rope to slog through a .500-ish second half — or worse — and still be ready to rock in October. But if that’s what you’d think, think again. Check out what’s actually happened, just in the theoretically more forgiving wild-card era (1995-present).

Losing second-half records, still made it to the World Series

2023 Diamondbacks: 32-39
2006 Cardinals: 35-39
2006 Tigers: 36-38

Worst second-half records, won the World Series

2006 Cardinals: 35-39
1996 Yankees: 40-37
2014 Giants: 35-31

(Source: Baseball Reference / Stathead)

Adam Wainwright celebrates after the Cardinals defeated the Tigers in Game 5 to win the 2006 World Series.  (David E. Klutho / Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)

Yes, you read that right. In the wild-card era, only one team has survived a losing record after the All-Star break and still won the World Series. …

And only three teams have played .500 or worse and even lived to play in a World Series — where two of them (the 2006 Cardinals and Tigers) actually matched up with each other. …

But even if we raise the bar slightly, every World Series winner in these last three decades has been at least five games over .500 in the second half — except for the three teams above.

So what does that tell us about baseball? Let’s ask the manager of the club that had the worst second half of any of the teams on those lists — Torey Lovullo of the 2023 Diamondbacks.

“It’s an emotional roller coaster,” Lovullo told me and Doug Glanville on the latest episode of The Windup’s Starkville podcast. “This game is crazy. And it will wear you down.”

So how does any team spin through that roller coaster and survive with enough equilibrium to hit the reset button in October?

“We talk about consistency,” Lovullo said. “We just want to have guys that understand where they’re at and not get too high or not get too low. But eventually, we’re going to find our way. It’s the madness of a baseball season, and it does happen. And if you let it spiral, it will take you into a place that’s very dark. But if you believe that you’re going to find a way out of it, (you can).”

More on the Diamondbacks momentarily. But first, let’s look more closely at the Phillies and Guardians — and how worried they should be about their own second-half issues.

The Phillies

The Phillies were riding high when they swept the Dodgers in July. Then things went sideways. (Bill Streicher / USA Today)

THEIR GREATEST HITS — On July 9-10-11, the Phillies bulldozed Shohei Ohtani’s Dodgers in a three-game series in Philadelphia. So 93 games into their season, the Phillies were 61-32. They were on a 106-win pace. They were 6 1/2 games up on L.A. in the race for the National League’s No. 1 seed. They had the best pitching staff in the league and the deepest offense in the league. What could possibly go wrong? Ha.

HOW WRONG COULD IT GO? So naturally, over the Phillies’ next 35 games, they went 13-22. Only one team had a worse record over that six-week stretch. And it was — who else? — the White Sox. Just three teams had a worse ERA in that span. And the Phillies’ once-rampaging offense scored nearly 80 fewer runs in that stretch than Torey Lovullo’s Diamondbacks. So …

HOW’D THAT HAPPEN? There was one thing Dave Dombrowski knew: Whatever the heck was going on with his team, those 35 games were not telling him this group wasn’t talented enough.

“We had eight All-Stars, right?” the Phillies’ president of baseball operations said. “So that tells you you’re a very talented team. So you don’t go from a team that has a lot of talent to not having any talent.”

But Dombrowski did see several things that concerned him. One was the pitching — starting with a banged-up rotation whose issues wound up overtaxing the Phillies’ previously dominant bullpen.

But Dombrowski also was puzzled by the shocking decline of the offense after a consistently relentless first half. Next thing he knew, that same lineup spent a month re-enacting NLCS Games 6 and 7 against the Diamondbacks.

Most of all, though, Dombrowski wondered if maybe they’d all gotten too comfortable after such a dominant first half. The Phillies had such a big lead by the middle of June, they seemed to start prioritizing what they could do to keep their core healthy for October. So Dombrowski admits he has asked himself if that possibly sent the wrong message.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe we set the tempo somewhere. Maybe we started looking at the long term rather than the short term. But I’m not sure about that.”

He just knew there was time to fix what felt broken. And over the last couple of weeks, the Phillies seem to have done that, roaring through a 9-2 streak against the Royals, Astros, Braves, Blue Jays and Marlins. So what changed? We’ll get back to that momentarily. But first …

The Guardians

After a win over the White Sox on July 4, the high-flying Guardians were one of the worst teams in the AL over the next 48 games. (David Richard / USA Today)

THEIR GREATEST HITS — On the Fourth of July, the Guardians dusted off the White Sox to raise their record to 54-31. They led the AL Central by six games (after once leading by as many as nine in late June). They had the best record in the American League, the fewest runs allowed in the league and 80 more runs scored than they had at the same stage last season. So they were all set for a run at 100 wins, right? Oops.

HOW WRONG COULD IT GO? The marathon is always longer than it seems. Over the next 48 games, the Guardians went 21-27. Only two teams in the AL — the Angels and White Sox — had worse records in that stretch. The Guardians’ starting pitching imploded (10-24, 4.87 ERA). And going by their 83 wRC+, only two lineups in baseball were less productive.

By the end of play on Aug. 27, after a third straight loss at home to Kansas City, the Guardians’ nine-game pad had, shockingly, disappeared. The Royals had tied them in the standings. And a beautiful Cleveland baseball summer didn’t seem so balmy anymore. So …

HOW’D THAT HAPPEN? Was it really as bleak as all those messy factoids above made it seem? Not in the eyes of the Guardians’ unflappable president of baseball ops, Chris Antonetti.

“We had a really tough stretch of games after the All-Star break,” Antonetti said, “with seven of our nine opponents in playoff position at the time we played them.

“Last I looked,” he went on, “I think we have the second-most wins in the AL against teams with better than a .500 record. So we’ve held our own there.”

But does that record alone tell the full story of the Guardians? I’m not so sure it does.

Early in the season, balls were sailing over the fence. Steven Kwan seemed like he might make a charge at .400. And this looked like a completely different offense than the group that finished 27th in MLB in runs scored last year — and dead last in homers.

But what did the next seven weeks look like, after the White Sox left town on July 4? Not quite so picturesque!

But also, there were …

 (*11th-best in MLB; **9th-lowest in MLB)

Like the Phillies, the Guardians seem to have rebounded in the last week or so. They’ve won five of their last seven. They’ve stretched their lead in the Central back to four games. And they averaged nearly seven runs per game in the five wins. So when Antonetti looks at these last two months, he sees just the normal “ebbs and flows to the regular season.”

He sees a rotation that looks much improved after the addition of Alex Cobb and Matthew Boyd. He sees an offense whose downturn stemmed mostly from matchups with a bunch of excellent staffs. So here was his big-picture read:

“Maybe I’m not thinking about it deeply enough,” he said. “But I’m not sure there’s too much I’d make of it. There’s not a lot of predictability to which teams win and advance once the postseason starts.”

Then he asked: “Didn’t Texas and Arizona (the two World Series teams in 2023) struggle in August last year before surging in September?”

Excellent question! The Rangers lost 16 of 20 in August and September, but then won 17 of their next 21 games. And the Diamondbacks rocked through a wilder ride to the World Series than any team ever.

On July 1, they were 16 games over .500 (50-34). But then … repeat after me … baseball happened. The Diamondbacks won only seven of their next 32, propelling them from 16 games over .500 to two games under, with 46 left to play. Whereupon they boomeranged again, going 27-15 before getting swept in their final series of the season in Houston.

It added up to a sub-.500 second half — but with a season-saving rebound in September. And if that feels like a blueprint for all the teams on our Not So Good list, it’s because it is.

For every one of those teams, September offers the opportunity to rediscover their first-half mojo. And the Diamondbacks leaned into that opportunity, then used the memory of that rebound again this season to fuel their torrid recovery from a 25-32 start.

“I think our guys have a very high baseball IQ … and this innate belief,” Lovullo said. “We used to hope we were going to win games. We were so concerned about what’s happening across the field, in the other dugout. (But now) we believe in so much of what’s going on in our space that we know we’re going to find a way to get something done every single night.”

“If you let it spiral, it will take you into a place that’s very dark. But if you believe that you’re going to find a way out of it, (you can),” said Torey Lovullo, who guided the 2023 D-Backs to an unlikely World Series appearance. (Joe Camporeale / USA Today)

So what have we learned from these rides on the baseball roller coaster? It’s as basic as a 3-and-2 fastball:

Wake me up before September ends

If all of this feels familiar to Dave Dombrowski, it’s because he has seen this movie before. Heck, he lived this movie — with the 2006 Tigers.

“It’s funny. I was talking to Jim Leyland (the manager of that Tigers team) about 2006 just recently,” Dombrowski said. “And we agreed that one of the common denominators was: You must have had a really good first half … to qualify for the postseason and still be below .500 in the second half.  So basically, it usually means the talent is there. And for some reason, you’ve fallen off. So why?”

Why? Dombrowski believes there’s no more important question for any team to contemplate. When a team begins to slide, there is almost always more than one reason. But the danger sign he’s always on the lookout for is when a team with a big lead takes its foot off the accelerator.

“Sometimes,” he said, “some people will become somewhat, I don’t know if this is the right word, but content. They’ll lose a little bit of that extra fire. And even though that’s not good, what you need to do is rekindle that fire — to find it again in order to be successful in the postseason.”

That’s exactly what happened to that 2006 Tigers team, he believes. So “the key to getting back on track,” he said, “is the ‘why’ — and how do you fix it?”

In 2006, Leyland delivered a message to his troops that September: Let’s get focused. And over the past couple of weeks, Dombrowski said, his manager in Philly, Rob Thomson, has empowered the leaders in his clubhouse to sing that same tune.

“It’s something they’ve talked about,” Dombrowski said, “something they’ve worked on. And I think they’ve already gotten that message across. I think we’ve played much better (recently). And we really needed to get that back in gear.”

Is the baseball marathon a series of ebbs and flows? It always is. And sometimes those ebbs and flows even strike in September. But as October nears, Dombrowski has long understood, the best teams know it’s the ability to play with focus and energy every day that often separates the champs from everyone else.

So in baseball, September isn’t foliage time. It’s focus time.

“It’s just one of those things,” he said, “where you just need to kind of get it back. When you win a lot of games early, you put yourself in a position where you can withstand that little lull.

“But you’re not going to win a championship,” Dombrowski said, “if you continue to have that lull going into the postseason.”

(Top photo of Phillies outfielder Brandon Marsh: Matt Krohn / Getty Images)