Our Magic Number

After a very solid win today, one of the best in quite a while, it's time to start tracking our magic number. But we're not in any lead, you might say, how can we calculate a magic number? It's easy. Take the number of games remaining, add 1, then add the number of games your team is behind in the loss column. Here it is for the Nats, relative to winning the division: 25 games remaining, plus 1, plus 7 for the games behind the Braves in the loss column. So our magic number for winning the division is 33. Every time the Nats win, it goes down by one. Every time the Braves lose, it goes down by one. So, even if we won all of our remaining 25 games, we'd need the Braves to lose at least 8 games to win the division.

But what about the other teams between us and the Braves? How do we figure them into the magic number? Well, we don't, for now. They come into play if the Braves drop out of the lead. At that point, we figure our magic number based on the new leading team's loss total.

For the Wild Card, we have 25 remaining games, plus 1, plus 2 games behind the Phils in the loss column, so our magic number is 28 games for the Wild Card.

We'll be tracking this in the sidebar, replacing the Playoff Pace section with the Magic Number section.