How Bad the Collapse?

Over at Baseball Prospectus, Nate Silver uses BP's postseason odds report system to analyze which teams in baseball history had the highest probability, at some point in the regular season, of getting to the post-season but ultimately failed: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=6764

The Mets sudden collapse this September ranks second all-time using this methodology, because on September 12 they had a 99.8% probability of making the playoffs and failed -- only the 1995 Angels, with a 99.99 probability on August 12 that season rank higher in the collapse category.

But having cited Silver's article, I'm not sure if this method quite captures the right sense of a spectacular collapse, a sense I didn't really feel this season with the Mets, not quite in the way that, say, Dodgers fans apparently felt in 1951.

I would hypothesize that this lack of a sense of a truly spectacular fold has to do with the lack of a long period during which the Mets dominated this season before falling apart. Yes, the Mets were up 7 with 17 games to go and couldn't hold the lead, an unprecedented fall from that particular spot. But the Mets were not dominant in the NL East this season -- it's not as if they had the division under control all year only to lose it in the end. Quite the opposite: The Mets were shadowed almost all season by the Phillies and Braves, briefly expanding their lead late to a momentary 7 games before falling back again and ultimately blowing the last of the lead at the worst moment. That's not quite what I think of when I think of a spectacular late season collapse.

To quantify my instinct here, I calculated the average games in or behind first place the Mets held after each game this season (so if after a day of games the Mets were in first by 2 games I counted that as +2, and if they were two games out of first I counted it as -2. Using this method, the Mets' averaged 2.4 games in first place during the 2007 season. By comparison, the 1951 Dodgers averaged 3.6 games in first place and the 1969 Cubs 3.4 games in first place. Using Nate Silver's maximum probability measure, both these teams fell short of the Mets collapse, but that's just a single game comparison in a long season. My averaging method may be a better approach to measuring a team's level of dominance across the season before falling short, and may indicate why the '51 Dodgers and '69 Cubs seem subjectively more shocking examples of collapse than the Mets of 2007.