12-28 in the standings, flatly bad, but 6 of the last 10 games won, and the index reads 73.4 BELIEVING. The model grades deviation from a team's own baseline; for the worst team in modern baseball, that baseline was already so low that a good stretch read as euphoria.
2
08/02 · INDEX 31 · BRACING
The floor
27-85, index 30.7: the lowest this team's index would ever go, in the middle of a run that spent 14 straight days in BRACING, the model's second-worst zone. It never got worse than that. It never got to DOOMED at all.
3
09/27 · INDEX 69 · BELIEVING
Loss No. 121
39-121, index 68.7 BELIEVING: the loss that broke the 1962 Mets' modern-era record for futility, and the model was optimistic the day it happened, riding a stretch of near-.500 ball that, for this club, passed as a hot streak.
4
09/29 · INDEX 78 · BELIEVING
Final line
41-121, index 77.7 BELIEVING, the highest zone this fanbase saw all year, arriving in the season's final week. Across 143 measured days this team spent more time in BELIEVING (52 days) than in BRACING (27), the worst zone it ever reached, and zero in DOOMED.
41-121 · finished at 78 BELIEVING · Zero days in DOOMED, across an entire 121-loss season. Twenty-seven days in BRACING, the floor this team ever found, and fifty-two in BELIEVING: more time reading hope than dread, for a 41-121 club. That isn't the index missing the story. A team can't fall below its own baseline once the baseline is already 41-121; by September, staying merely bad started to look like progress, and the model, doing exactly what it's built to do, noticed.
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Team names used descriptively. Data: MLB Stats API, FanGraphs, Polymarket. Anonymous usage analytics.