All-Star Break

Heading into the weekend series in Colorado, the Phillies are battling to stay above .500.  After an ugly April and a hot May, the Phils spent most of June treading water.  With this mediocrity in mind, I wondered how the Phillies record at the midway point correlated to their final results.  In recent history of course no All-Star break record of any sort has produced a playoff team so we should eliminate that from any preliminary prognostications.  Here are the records heading into the break and at the end of the season:

Year	All-Star Break	End of Season
2002	39-47	80-81
2003	52-40	86-76
2004	46-41	86-76
2005	45-44	88-74
2006	40-47	85-77
2007	43-42 (3 games remaining)	??-??

Jumping off the chart is the 2003 season, when the team took it on the chin from the Marlins in the final weeks.  But looking closely, that is the only season out of the six in which the Phillies did not have a better second half.  Baseball Prospectus has calculated that if the rest of the season were played a million times

, the Phils would make the playoffs in 10% of the seasons.  There are plenty of games throughout a 162 game schedule that could help beat those odds.  A series win against the Rockies might be the difference between an 88 win season and a 90 win season.