Will the Mets finish in last place in the NL East?

The New York Mets are currently 53-61, a .465 winning percentage.  They’ve dropped seven of their last 10 and 10 of their last 14.

The team currently last in the NL East, the Washington Nationals, are 40-74, a .351 winning percentage.  But they’re won eight of their last 10 games.

So with the basic Excel skills I know, I wanted to see if the Mets could end up in last place in 2009. 

Answer: It’s possible (maybe if the season never ended).

Here’s the two teams winning percentages on a graph, with an average trendline.  (Basic trendline rules: trendline going up = winning more games of late, trendline going down = winning less games as of late.)As you can see, the Nationals have been winning more games lately, while the Mets have not.

Taking a very rudimentary approach to extrapolating this out, I turned to Photoshop and traced the trendlines out, so you could see what would eventually happen if both teams stay on their respective paths.Eventually, if the season lasted forever, the Nationals would overtake the Mets if each team kept playing (read: winning and losing) at their current pace.

I’m not sure if this is possible in the games left for the 2009 season, but if they just kept playing baseball until next March, it would happen.

The Mets can stay out of the basement with a few more wins here or there, but if they don’t veer off their current path, the Nationals may have a change to leap-frog them into fourth place.

Scary, isn’t it?