Lotte desperately needs a 9-game winning streak …
The average for 5th place in the KBO 10-team system is 72 wins
Lotte needs 19 wins in 32 remaining games to reach 50% winning percentage
Looking at it calmly, it is not easy for the professional baseball Lotte Giants,
who led the league until mid-May, to advance to the 2023 postseason.
Lotte Giants
Lotte, ranked 7th with 53 wins, 59 losses, and a winning percentage of 0.473,
has widened the gap with the KIA Tigers,
ranked 5th (56 wins, 50 losses, 2 draws, and a winning percentage of 0.528), to six games.
Considering that KIA has continued its recent 8-game winning streak and has 36 games remaining,
the most in the league, it is not easy to catch up. 토토사이트
What Lotte needs now is a winning streak.
Hope can only be raised by recalling the memories of the team leading the league with an unstoppable 9-game winning streak at the end of April.
Last Month
On the 28th of last month, in the midst of Lotte’s 7th straight loss,
coach Larry Sutton voluntarily resigned due to health reasons,
seemingly giving up hope for the postseason.
Lotte Giants, which decided to play the remainder of the season under acting coach Lee Jong-woon,
changed the atmosphere and extinguished the emergency.
They had 3 wins and 1 loss in the last 4 games, and went on a winning streak for the first time in 19 days
by defeating the Doosan Bears and Samsung Lions on the 4th and 5th, respectively.
9 Battles of Death
Lotte is standing in the middle of the so-called ‘nine battles of death’.
The game against Doosan in Busan on the 2nd was canceled due to rain,
so the game was postponed to Monday the 4th, and a double header against NC Dinos will be played in Changwon on the 9th.
They must play 9 games over 8 days from the 3rd to the 10th without a single day off,
must win as long as possible to keep their hopes of playing fall baseball for the first time in 6 years since 2017.
First of all, Lotte’s priority is to achieve a winning percentage of 50% in the remaining schedule.
They need to win 19 out of 32 games to get back to exactly .500.
KBO League
Over the eight seasons from 2015, when the KBO League established a 10-team system and expanded the regular season to 144 games,
until last year, the average number of wins for the 5th-place team was 72.125.
If we round up and say 72 wins, it means that half of the games played in a season must be won to catch the last train for fall baseball.
In 2015, when competition for the mid-tier was unprecedentedly fierce,
the SK Wyverns (now SSG Landers) took 5th place with 69 wins (73 losses, 2 draws),
setting a record for advancing to the postseason with the fewest wins in a 144-game system.
Kiwoom Heroes
In 2020, Kiwoom Heroes finished the season in 5th place
despite achieving 80 wins (63 losses, 1 draw) amid extreme sluggishness
with 9th place SK and 10th place Hanwha Eagles falling to a winning percentage of .300.
Considering that KIA, currently ranked 5th, maintains a win rate well over .500,
realistically, it should achieve more wins.
Probability
According to ‘psodds.com’, a website that calculates the probability of advancing to the postseason based on Pythagorean expected winning percentage,
Lotte’s current probability of advancing to the postseason is 5.7%.
The probability was 3.7% just a few days ago, but has risen to 5.7% with the recent two consecutive wins.
This means that it is a difficult goal.
Lotte, with its two starting pitchers Park Se-woong and Na Kyun-an all participating in the Hangzhou Asian Games,
must accumulate as many wins as possible before then.