What types of softball teams do well?  What does it take to make the playoffs?  These are some of the important questions that every organization asks of themselves each year as they try to improve their team and take their shot at history. 

Making the playoffs is easy, right?  Over the past 5 years in the mens City of Kingston C League (Kingston, NY), 28 of 51 teams have made the playoffs.  For the sake of competitive balance, let’s throw out the Lower C results from the past two years.  That leaves 39 teams, 20 of which were playoff bound.  That’s actually more than half!  So in other words, you only need to be average or slightly better to qualify?  Wow!

Not quite.  No 8-8 team qualified for the playoffs.  Even 9 wins isn’t likely to get you there – only one 9 win team has made it in.  For both a 16 and an 18 game schedule, 10 wins seems to be the benchmark.  All but one team with 10 or more wins made their way to the playoffs.

Ok, so 10 wins is the goal.  But HOW do you get there?  No team takes the field looking to lose.  Statistically, what makes a winning team?  As Sweet Tooth Tom Klonowski once said, “If you win the inning, you win the inning.  If you win every inning, you win the game.”  That’s common sense, but what Sweet Tooth is saying is, all you have to do is outscore your opponent.  Is being a high scoring team really all it takes?  Let’s see. 

The table above pretty clearly shows that you only have to score slightly better than the league average to make the playoffs.  17 of 20 teams in this situation qualified, while only 3 or 19 teams below the mark made it.

How about defense?  Does that matter?  The old baseball adage is that defense and pitching trump a high powered offense.  However, softball has a much higher run environment; typical games aren’t low scoring affairs such as in baseball.  Also, softball pitchers aren’t throwing 95 mph heaters and basically have to “lay it in there”.  So defense and pitching don’t matter, right? 

Wrong again.  Good defense is still very much a hallmark of successful teams.  18 of 24 (75%) teams who gave up less runs than the league average made the playoffs. 

In fact, run scoring and run prevention are so vital that if you look at all of the teams which were below average in both facets, not even a single one made the playoffs!  What about the teams we mentioned earlier – the teams which were below average in one aspect or the other yet still were on top of the league?  The low scoring teams compensated by having a remarkably good defense, while the poor defensive teams were offensive juggernauts.  The common denominator seems to be run differential.  If you rank the teams by run differential, the top 14 teams ALL made the playoffs.  Conversely, none of the bottom 16 teams made it in.

If you outscore your opponent by an average of 3 or more runs per game, history dictates that you will receive a playoff berth.  It’s that simple.

What have we learned?  Making the playoffs can be accomplished by scoring a lot of runs OR keeping your opponent from doing so.  As long as you are above average in either area you will be successful.  Even more important is a team’s run differential.  As Sweet Tooth said “It’s a hitter’s game, gentlemen!”, but if you’re not going to score, you’d better make sure the opponent doesn’t either!

Now that we see what it takes to make it, next time we’ll look at what types of teams win once they’re in.