The Royals beat the White Sox 8-5 Monday night to drop Chicago’s winning percentage to .248. That is below the .250 winning percentage of the 1962 Mets, the modern record for mediocrity. Time to update the probability of them finishing with no more than 40 wins.

They need to go 13-40 the rest of the way to beat the Mets. The lowest winning percentage that includes 27 wins in 109 games in the 95 percent confidence interval is .330. The probability of no more than 13 wins at that level is 0.12. For replacement level of .296, the probability stands at 0.26. So the White Sox right now have about a 12% to 26% chance of finishing with no more than 40 wins. At the conservative level, they’ve gone from one in ten to one in eight.

Update: A friend of mine pointed out that I did not explain the 95% CI properly. It’s not the lowest winning percentage that includes 27 wins, it’s the lowest winning percentage that includes 27 wins as the low end of the range.