With yet another loss, the Royals dropped to 4-9 in September. With 19 games remaining, they will have to go 12-7 to just finish .500 for the month (plus a little of October). It is an arbitrary timestamp to divide up team or player performance by simply turning the page on a calendar, but it is a handy (and easy) way to analyze a chunk of games.

In the case of September records (and for the purposes of this article, that will include the smattering of games that have been played the first week of October), they do give us some indication of how a team is playing as the season winds down. It can be fools’ gold, where a bad team has, say, an 18-8 September and makes moves in the off-season based on the idea that they were better than they were, but we are not talking about bad teams today. We are talking about playoff teams and your Kansas City Royals are having a somewhat irrelevant September, not because they are bad, but because they are already a playoff lock.

I’ll digress for a moment and make fun of the following people:

• Those worried about the Minnesota Twins catching the Royals. If the Royals win just five games the rest of the year, the Twins would have go 15-4 just to tie them. FIFTEEN and FOUR, people.
• Those certain Johnny Cueto is on the take with Vegas. Yeah, because that happens with professional players making millions.
• Those that believe all Cueto cares about is the money. Hmm, seems like a pitcher headed into free agency would likely want to pitch well in order to make, you know, more money.
• Those that don’t care about Cueto because ‘he’s not a Royal’. I don’t know where that line of crap came from (feels like a Texas A&M or The Citadel kind of thing), but then you also are not allowed to care about Lorenzo Cain, Alcides Escobar, Wade Davis, Edinson Volquez, Ben Zobrist, Ryan Madson and Kendrys Morales. You know who else isn’t ‘a Royal’? Dayton Moore and Ned Yost.
• Those, and this is the ‘look at me, I’m a super smart contrarian’ crowd, that ‘were worried about this happening with Cueto when we got him’. You were worried about Cueto imploding? Even though there is six seasons worth of data (including the first four months of this season) that give no indication of this? So, you were guessing then, right? Hey, I like to gamble and I like to guess, too, it doesn’t make me smart.

Anyway…..

Rany Jazayerli brought this up last week, but you can take some comfort in the Royals recent tailspin by looking at the 2000 New York Yankees. That team lost its last seven games of the regular season, giving up seven runs or more in six of those games and never scoring more than four runs. They then proceeded to win the ALDS, the ALCS and the World Series. I have written several times about how a baseball team can not just ‘flip the switch’. The 2000 Yankees stand as an example of ‘wanna bet?’.

Let’s take a look at some more playoff teams. Below are all the teams that have made the playoffs in the last ten years, sorted by best September record to worst with their post-season results included:

Not surprisingly, teams that make the playoffs are usually pretty good teams and pretty good teams usually win lots of games. As such, many of the past playoff teams played winning baseball in the last month of the season. A fair number because they had to, just to get in, but there are teams with big leads that on that list that had big Septembers as well. Probably worth noting is none of the best ten September records of the last ten years won the World Series. Although to be fair, three of those teams did make the Series.

Sorting the list by post-season result (and this doesn’t sort out right as far as success, other than it puts the World Series winners first and the World Series losers second - I could do better, but I won’t) we get this:

Twenty teams made the World Series in the last ten years (math!) and only three of those twenty had losing Septembers and only one, the 83-79 2006 Cardinals, won the championship. Now, I should not be so greedy, given my adult life pretty much began with the 1985 World Series and was followed by a barge fulls of crappy baseball, but just making the playoffs this year is not really a big deal for me. I can live with getting to the World Series and losing, but I will feel like 2015 is something of a disappointment if the post-season ends for Kansas City before that.

More years would give us a better taste without question. The 1980 Royals were not great down the stretch and they made the Series. If the Royals continue to swoon in September, maybe I’ll be motivated to dig deeper or, better yet, maybe someone younger will allocate some time away from Clash of Clans (or whatever, I don’t care) to give us twenty, thirty or forty years of data that will make us feel better.

I am concerned, but not panicked. The above numbers are hardly absolutes, but they are not exactly reassuring, either.