September of last year, our intrepid hero made the following bet - if the Mariners are within five games of .500 at the conclusion of play, August 31, 2009, he becomes a mod for the month of September. If the Mariners fall outside this nine-game window, each mod gets to cockpunch him at a time and location of their choosing.

Just today, new user Poochie asked for an update on the status of the bet.

I've created a simple WE chart for the bet, based on a simple binomial distribution, and assuming the Mariner's current Pythagorean Expectation to be their odds of winning the next game. After that, it was a simple matter (well with a lot of numbers) to determine the approximate odds of the Mariners winning between 64 and 69 games before September 1

robert2 (via seattlebruin)

After tonight's game against the Orioles, the M's have a Pythagorean expectation of .442 from here on out, and they've won 25 games already. Thus, I simply needed to find the probability of them winning between 38 and 43 of the next 80 games. As you can see, the odds aren't bad - about 40%.

I repeated this process retroactively for the beginning of the season - as you can see, the team was much too good to hover around .500 at the start of the year. Ironically, the high point of the graph came on Silva's last start - it's been all downhill from there.

EDIT: Updated through tonight's 3-2 victory over Baltimore - Robert checking in at a robust 26.4% chance to avoid three junkpunches