Can Padres win 88 games this season? Make the playoffs?

If you listen to the Mighty 1090 you may have heard them use a snippet of a phone interview with Padres Chairman Ron Fowler saying that the Padres are "in it to win it".  He says he thinks that the team will need 88 wins to make it into the MLB post season.  At the beginning of the season it was inspirational now it just seems doubtful.

Only two Padres team have gotten into the playoffs with 88 wins or less.  The 2005 team with 82 wins and the 2006 team with 88.  The 1989 team and the 2007 team both had 89 wins and neither made the post season.  Neither did the 2010 team with 90 wins.

Is it even possible for a 37-41 team like the 2015 Padres to get 88 wins?   Here's a spreadsheet of all the teams with 88 or more wins and where they stood after 78 games.

It appears that the Padres will need to mimic the 1989 Padres game plan if they're going to get there.  With the pinstriped brown and orange retro uniforms already made up for a few select Wayback Wednesdays, now would be the time to really go "all in" and start wearing those threads every day.  That's part of the solution for sure.  Then they'll actually have to get to the playoffs unlike the 1989 team.

Another question I asked of myself was how many Padres teams have ever won 51 of 84 games?  I ran some numbers.  It's happened 120 times in quite a few different seasons.  The 1984, 1988, 1989, 1996, 1998 and 2010 all had at least 51 wins in a stretch of 84 games.  The 1998 team had the best 84 game record with 57 wins.

So it can be done!  But it will be ridiculously hard.