It’s one for the record books. The Red Sox won their 106th game Monday night, setting a new record for regular season wins in the 118-year history of the franchise. It’s a stunning regular season achievement, but what does it really mean?
As the Boston Globe’s Alex Speier laid out earlier this month, 100 wins doesn’t mean as much as it used to. In the Division Series era (1995-2017), only four of the 25 teams to win 100 games went on to win the World Series. Compare that to the Pennant era (1903-1968) when 60% of the 40 100-win teams that made the playoffs won a championship. The expansion of MLB’s playoff format guarantees a 100-win team a spot in the playoffs, but it makes their quest for a championship much more arduous. Overall, of the 100 teams that have won 100 games since 1901, only 36 have won the World Series.
Once you reach the 105-win threshold, you’re in more rarefied air:
The Sox are just the 19th team in the modern era to win more than 105 games and the first in 17 years. Eleven of those 19 won the World Series.
But while the numbers look promising, the Wild Card era has upset the apple cart here too. From 1901-1994, 13 of the 20 teams who won 105 or more games went on to win the World Series. Since the Wild Card was introduced in 1995, only one of the four teams to have reached the 105-win plateau won the Fall Classic.
The Wild Card era has revealed quite a few paper tigers, none more ridiculed than the ’01 Mariners. They set an MLB regular season wins record, then struggled to get out of the first round against an Indians team that was 25 games worse than them in the regular season and lost the ALCS to the Yankees in five games. They haven’t made the playoffs since.
Then there’s the ’98 Braves. They won 106 regular season games, but fell behind three games to none to the Padres and ultimately lost the NCLS in six games.
And of course Red Sox fans remember the ’04 Cardinals, the last team to win 105 games in the regular season. Ask Pedro Martinez and David Ortiz what all those wins mean once the World Series rolls around.