On the paradox of modern sports schedules, and the Phillies’ future outlook

In any walk of life, a big part of success is making the most of the moments of good fortune. Another big part is surviving the gauntlets. Stick around long enough and you’ll see plenty of each. The more you do, the more you’ll realize who is really in control:

Rob Manfred and Roger Goodell.

And whoever helps them make the schedule.

This was mostly going to be a column about the asterisk that some out-of-market folks have affixed to the Phillies’ best-in-majors record. I spent a good chunk of the morning buried up to my eyeballs in an Excel spreadsheet performing some forensic accounting on the National League’s softest schedule. To what extent have the Phillies benefited from their easy early-season slate? When will it change? How drastic will the difference be? They entered Tuesday on a 114-win pace: What will it look like the rest of the way?

In the midst of all my research, my mind kept drifting. So before we get to the Phillies, let’s pay some mind to one of the great philosophical paradoxes of our time.

The stakes of professional sports have never been higher. The attention, the salaries, the prizes, the same-game parlays, all suggest that wins and losses are more serious than ever. Along with this increase in competitive intensity — as a direct result of it, really — has come a decrease in emphasis on fair, sensible scheduling.

The NFL takes the brunt of the criticism, and we’ll get to that shortly, but the phenomenon is universal. Baseball is currently on pace to have a pair of 100-win teams begin the postseason by playing seven games in nine days in two cities. One of those teams might have an extra off day, as the Phillies did last season and did not the year before.

At least baseball’s formula is more consistent than the NBA’s. In the first round, the Knicks had five off days in their first four games against the Sixers. In the second round, they had three off days in their first four games against the Pacers. This, in a sport in which load management is king.

Then we have football, the most brutal of them all, and the most unconcerned. Warren Sharp, a betting analyst with a large Twitter following, has done admirable work on the impact of rest on the competitive product. According to his figures, the 2024 season will see 10 teams endure a stretch of three games in 10 days after the NFL scheduled just two for that scenario in the last decade, and none in the last five years.

» READ MORE: Saquon Barkley as NFL MVP? Maybe not. In the conversation? You bet, with or without the numbers.

I am not assigning any sort of value judgment here. I want to be clear about that, for the sake of my personal integrity. Who among us has the right to complain about games on Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day? Let he without the remote control cast the first stone.

I am simply observing. The schedule has an impact, more than we ever care to acknowledge. The issue isn’t necessarily whether one team has an advantage over the other. It is the overarching competitive framework. We are supposed to believe that a win or a loss has some universal meaning, the establishment of one team’s supremacy over another. There has always been some degree of variance baked in. The weather, the refs, the bounce of the ball, home and away. For the most part, though, sports are constructed to be situation neutral.

Look no further than the Eagles’ season opener to see how it has changed. It will be billed as a showdown between two playoff qualifiers and two up-and-coming quarterbacks. Tune in to see whether the Eagles or Packers are better. Except, what if the Eagles were actually at their home stadium? Or, at least, their home time zone? Any given Sunday has become any given Friday, after a 12-hour flight, in the Southern Hemisphere, on a soccer pitch.

Maybe it’s fitting. So much of what happens to us in life is a function of timing. Why should a sports schedule be any different?

Were the Eagles really as good as we thought they were in 2022? Or did they simply beat up on a regular season full of patsies, then beat two teams without a quarterback — one of them literally — before playing a great game against a great team that it nevertheless lost?

Were they really as bad as we thought they were at the end of 2023? What if they’d been beaten the Cardinals in Week 2, and gotten blown out by the 49ers when they were 3-1, and the Cowboys when they were 8-2? What if the schedule had made their 11-6 finish feel much more ordinary?

It’s an interesting question to think about when you look at the road ahead. What happens to Nick Sirianni if the Eagles start 4-0 or 3-1, then face the Browns, Bengals, Jaguars, Cowboys, Rams, and Ravens in an eight-week stretch?

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I suppose it is what it is. Which brings us back to the Phillies. They haven’t played a team with a winning record since their opening series against the Braves. They’ve played one with a positive run differential during that stretch. They are 21-5 against the NL East and the NL West. This has led to some questions about the sustainability of their 34-14 start. For good reason. History has shown 114 wins to be close to the upper bound of what is possible.

Yet they have done what they have done. There would be legitimate questions if they hadn’t. Yet they have, and there isn’t a stretch of schedule in the world that can negate winning 70% of the first quarter of one’s games. At some point, the question should shift. Maybe the Phillies really aren’t this good? No. Maybe everybody else is this bad.

Look at it this way. The Phillies have 43 games remaining against teams that entered Tuesday more than one game above .500. That’s 40 more than they’ve played thus far this season. They also have 71 games left against other teams. If they beat those other teams at a 70% clip, they can go 17-26 against the “good” teams and still get to 100 wins.

It is a double-edged sword. The Phillies happen to have a back-loaded schedule. To get where they want to go, they needed to do what they are doing. That they have done it to this degree is an accomplishment in itself. It is what the greatest of teams do. They make the schedule irrelevant.