MORE FROM THE GEEK ON THE DOUBLE STANDARD

Gotta kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight . . .

As noted yesterday, there seems to be a double standard perpetrated against the Blue Jays by the Toronto media. Even with yesterday's loss to the Phillies (don't ask), the Jays are 46-35 at the exact halfway point in the season, putting them on pace for 92 wins.

(Here's a reaction to the debacle that is the All-Star Game selections.)

So I looked back over the 11 seasons since the current playoff system was first used and wondered what 92 wins gets you. (For '95, every team's record was pro-rated over 162 games.)

Turns out only five of the 69 teams that reached that victory plateau have missed the post-season. Only one, -- the 2002 Red Sox, finished more than five games out of a playoff berth.

The others were all finished within 3½ games of the division or wild-card winner, and really, in a division with Evil Empires 1 and 1-A, the Jays will be able to hold their heads high if they can stay in the race until the final week of September.

The other interesting discovery is that the bar for making the playoffs seems to be getting higher, at least in the AL. Since '95, there have been 24 teams -- on average, two a year -- that got into the post-season with fewer than 92 wins (actual or pro-rated).

However, 15 of those came in the first four years of the new format. Since 1999, there's only been one season where the AL had a playoff team with less than 92 wins. That was 2000, when it had three.

What's happened? Not sure of the cause-and-effect, but since that season, the unbalanced schedule came in, and the AL teams generally began having their way in interleague games (a trend the Jays, who went 9-9 against the NL, generally haven't followed). In other words, a playoff spot or contending means whaling on the punching bags at the bottom of your division and rolling through games against the junior varsity teams, AKA the National League.

So why aren't the real sportswriters making note of this? Why does the task fall on this desperate wannabe and his imaginary friend? You tell me. Yes, they have deadlines and pressure to pump out more copy than in the past, but The Geek and myself found all of this with 15 minutes at Baseball-Reference.com.