Will the Phillies’ hot start lead to a World Series title? Here’s what the numbers say.

Rob Thomson wanted to make a point.

Last week, the Phillies became only the 24th major league team in 123 years to win at least 37 of their first 51 games, an impressive feat that means little in the scope of their overall mission. So, the typically amiable manager turned up his nose at the mention of the last team to start as quickly.

“What did they do at the end?” Thomson said of the 2001 Mariners.

The intention wasn’t to take a swipe at Edgar Martínez or Jamie Moyer, or to disrespect former Phillies general manager Pat Gillick, a Hall of Fame executive and architect of that Seattle team. Thomson was saying, very simply, that for all of their 116 regular-season wins, those Mariners didn’t win the World Series, an outcome that these Phillies would find unacceptable.

Thomson’s message: Stay humble, even amid the best start in the history of a 142-year-old franchise, because baseball usually has a way of doing it for you.

Sure enough, the wretched Rockies plucked two of three games from the Phillies over the weekend in the thin Colorado air before the Giants grabbed two more in San Francisco. All it took was one bad week to skew the narrative. Fans who were over the moon for two months are suddenly wringing their hands — or worse, panicking on sports-talk radio.

Here’s the thing: Most of baseball is still ogling the Phillies’ 39-18 record and plus-93 run differential through slightly more than one-third of the season. The Phillies have stacked wins like chips at the World Series of Poker, insuring themselves against the inevitable normalization that is already happening.

And by Memorial Day, they made themselves a virtual lock to play in October. That isn’t nothing, even if everything about the World Series-or-bust Phillies is predicated only on what actually happens once October arrives.

“You find value in winning, and you find value in each guy doing their job,” Bryce Harper said. “We all just want to go out there and do our job. No matter the outcome, it’s on to the next one. It’s got to be that kind of mentality. Because we’ve got a long ways to go.”

Lefty reliever Matt Strahm put the historic start into context in another way: “It is cool, but we all know what we want to accomplish. Other Phillies clubs have won the World Series and that’s the most impressive thing, so that’s what we want to do.”

Fair enough. It’s worth asking, then: What does the Phillies’ start tell us about their World Series chances? Let’s dig into the data and draw some conclusions:

Two things, one quantifiable by numbers, the other not as much.

Start with the starting pitching. Led by Zack Wheeler, Aaron Nola, and Ranger Suárez, Phillies starters have a 2.68 ERA, better by more than half a run than any National League team. (The Cubs were next at 3.30 entering Wednesday night.) The Phillies also lead the majors in innings pitched by starters (342) and were tied for first with 33 quality starts. (The Mariners had 33 entering Wednesday night.)

Chalk it up to dominance by Wheeler (2.32 ERA in 12 starts) and Suárez (1.75 ERA in 11 starts), the emergence of lefty Cristopher Sánchez (2.83 ERA in 11 starts), and the depth provided by Spencer Turnbull, who posted a 1.67 ERA in a half-dozen starts in place of the injured Taijuan Walker.

By comparison, Phillies starters had a 5.16 ERA in 287⅔ innings through 57 games en route to a 25-32 start last season. Suárez didn’t make his first start until May 13 because of a spring-training elbow injury. Bailey Falter flamed out as the No. 5 starter before Sánchez arrived from triple A in June. The rotation was in flux.

In 2022, Phillies starters had a 3.84 ERA in 309⅓ innings and were 28-29, but only after bottoming out at 21-29, leading to the firing of manager Joe Girardi. Starting pitching was a strength of that team, but not nearly as consistent as it has been this season.

“It’s a combination of things,” said Wheeler, who credits pitching coach Caleb Cotham’s game-planning and the pitch-calling of catchers J.T. Realmuto and Garrett Stubbs. “It’s throwing strikes, getting quick outs, being able to go deep into games. We all have that mentality of going seven-plus [innings] each time. That’s our goal. We have goals every time out, and that’s one of them.”

Said Harper: “Every time they’ve gone out, they’ve been absolutely lights out. Whenever you have that, the ability to win is way higher, right?”

Sure. It helps, too, that the Phillies are playing with single-minded focus after fumbling the NL Championship Series last year by losing Games 6 and 7 — at home, no less — to the Diamondbacks.

The Phillies kept last year’s roster virtually intact, with president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski and other team officials believing that the players would be motivated by what amounts to a second chance. So far, they’re correct.

“We all know what we’re here for, we all know where we want to go, and we all know what our goal is,” infielder Edmundo Sosa said through a team interpreter. “Our goal is set. We want to go and finish something that we have on hold right now.”

As the last week proved, no, a 117-win pace isn’t sustainable. But the beauty of a 37-14 start is that it covers all manner of warts, such as Nick Castellanos’ brutal two months at the plate. And you can stub your toe for six days in Colorado and San Francisco and barely feel it.

“It’s hard to maintain what we were doing,” Wheeler said. “It’s baseball at the end of the day. You have your ups and downs. Just take it as it comes. We’ll be all right.”

In all likelihood, yes.

Look, nothing is guaranteed. At 33-18, the 2001 Phillies had the fifth-best 51-game start in franchise history and wound up finishing 86-76 and missing the playoffs. The 1995 Phillies are the ultimate cautionary tale. They started 34-17 and cratered to a 69-75 finish.

But given what they’ve done so far, the Phillies could go only 53-52 the rest of the way and still win 92 games, one more than last year when they had the fourth-best record in the National League. It’s no wonder the projection systems at FanGraphs and Baseball-Reference give them a 97.7% and 98.7% chance, respectively, to make the playoffs and set them as the favorite to win the NL East.

There will be challenges. The Phillies’ depth will be tested by injuries and inevitable roster attrition. Last season, the Dodgers overcame losing four-fifths of their starting rotation. The Braves won the World Series in 2021 without Ronald Acuña Jr. and are experiencing life without him — and injured ace Spencer Strider — again.

The Phillies have largely withstood Trea Turner’s strained left hamstring because Sosa is playing like an All-Star. Alec Bohm, Bryson Stott, and Brandon Marsh have gone from young supporting-cast members to lead actors. But what would happen if Wheeler went down? Or Nola? Or Suárez? There isn’t much rotation depth in triple A.

So, there’s no need for the Phillies to apologize for pounding tomato cans in April and May. Until this week in San Francisco, they hadn’t played a team with a winning record since the season-opening series against the Braves. But they didn’t merely beat bad teams. They bludgeoned them, to the tune of a plus-93 run differential through last Thursday.

It adds up to a cushion that might come in handy as the schedule toughens. Circle this nine-game stretch: July 2-11, when the Phillies face the Cubs and Braves on the road before hosting the Dodgers for three games. Or this 19-game run: July 22 to Aug. 11 against the Twins, Guardians, Yankees, Mariners, Dodgers, and Diamondbacks, with all but six of those games away from Citizens Bank Park.

But of the 23 previous teams to start 37-14 or better, only the 1942 Dodgers didn’t make the playoffs — and that was when the postseason consisted only of the World Series.

It’s nice to be a member of that club.

OK, so this is the million-dollar — or in the case of the Phillies’ luxury-tax payroll, $258 million — question.

It’s virtually impossible to gauge because outcomes tend to be more random in the short sample of the playoffs than over 162 games. And it’s more difficult now to emerge victorious from a 12-team, three- or four-round postseason tournament than when only two or even four teams made the playoffs.

But here’s what history tells us:

That’s the company the Phillies really want to keep.

“We’re not naive,” Bohm said. “We know you’re not just going to flow right through a season with no adversity, no struggle, and everybody’s just happy-go-lucky and you show up and win every day. That’s not how it works. You just have to keep going.”