The Mariners beat the White Sox 6-3 Sunday afternoon, dropping the White Sox record to 27-81, a .250 winning percentage. That, of course, is the modern record for mediocrity set by the 40-120 1962 New York Mets.

Last season, I used this method to calculate the probability of the Oakland Athletics finishing below the Mets:

 “What is the probability of the team finishing with a lower winning percentage than the 1962 Mets, 40-120, a .250 winning percentage?”

To finish worse, the A’s need no more than 40 wins in total or 26-72 the rest of the season. I use two estimates of Oakland’s intrinsic winning percentage. The first is the highest winning percentage that includes 14 wins in a 95% confidence interval. For 64 games, that’s .339. The other estimate would be replacement level team, .296 (48 wins in a full season). 

BaseballMusings.com

So let’s apply that calculation for the White Sox. They need to go 13-41 the rest of the way to beat the Mets. The lowest winning percentage that includes 27 wins in 108 games in the 95 percent confidence interval is .333. The probability of no more than 13 wins at that level is 0.095. For replacement level of .296, the probability stands at 0.23. So the White Sox right now have about a 10% to 25% chance of finishing with no more than 40 wins. One in ten are not very long odds.