A Bayesian Check-In On Our Playoff Odds at the Quarter-Season Mark
As the resident FanGraphs playoff odds watcher, I spend a lot of time looking at our playoff odds and trying to figure out both what they’re seeing and what they’re missing. Over the years, I’ve written many audits of how well our odds perform. Last fall, I described a Bayesian method that does slightly better than any of our existing models at predicting playoff teams. It’s particularly useful early in the season, when the headline FanGraphs mode (using projections) can be slow to pick up on new information and the season-to-date mode is prone to overreaction. A Bayesian filter does a good job balancing those two – or so I found last year.
If you’re looking for a detailed technical description of the way that I’m blending up our existing playoff projections to churn out different odds projections, you can find it at the bottom of the article. But first, let’s take a Bayesian trip through the league and highlight the divisions where reconsidering our odds in light of how much the results so far have diverged from preseason expectations matters the most.
AL East
| Team | FG Playoff% | S2D Playoff% | Bayesian Playoff% | Bayesian – FG |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yankees | 98.3% | 95.0% | 96.9% | -1.4% |
| Rays | 90.5% | 93.8% | 92.6% | 2.1% |
| Blue Jays | 31.8% | 29.5% | 30.5% | -1.3% |
| Red Sox | 34.2% | 23.5% | 28.1% | -6.1% |
| Orioles | 20.4% | 8.7% | 13.8% | -6.6% |
If all the results looked like this, I wouldn’t have written this article. The Bayesian version of the playoff odds sit somewhere between the FanGraphs-style odds and the season-to-date odds, with exactly where it sits in between determined by how closely the team’s performance matches the FanGraphs model’s prior expectation. But pretty much across the board here, both sets of odds are in broad agreement, which means that my Bayesian averaging settles pretty much right in the middle. The Rays have banked enough wins that the FanGraphs model is very high on them even with a projected rest-of-season winning percentage right around .500.
AL Central
| Team | FG Playoff% | S2D Playoff% | Bayesian Playoff% | Bayesian – FG |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Guardians | 68.7% | 75.8% | 72.8% | 4.1% |
| White Sox | 14.5% | 40.7% | 29.6% | 15.1% |
| Twins | 21.3% | 31.3% | 26.7% | 5.4% |
| Tigers | 30.6% | 17.2% | 22.8% | -7.8% |
| Royals | 17.5% | 14.2% | 15.6% | -1.9% |
Now this is what I’m talking about. The White Sox are a fascinating team, and I completely sympathize with the projection-based modeling. The White Sox might be above .500, but they’re not doing it in a way that looks sustainable. They’ve been outscored on the year. Many of their veteran players are having their best stretches as big leaguers; rookies Munetaka Murakami and Sam Antonacci are playing far better than even an optimistic projection would expect.
That’s why the projections are still down on the Pale Hose. The Bayesian model doesn’t know any of that, though. It just knows that, on average, teams that play much better than their preseason projection in the early going tend to do better than the projections think the rest of the way. There hasn’t been much daylight between the four teams chasing the Guardians so far this year, and the Bayesian version of our odds takes that seriously. If the division looks this muddled, and the projection-based odds are in such disagreement with the season-to-date odds, the Bayesian model splits the difference and forecasts a tremendously interesting divisional race. The only problem is that it might be for second place – the Guardians have a divisional lead, and both models think they’re better than the teams closest to them in the standings.
AL West
| Team | FG Playoff% | S2D Playoff% | Bayesian Playoff% | Bayesian – FG |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mariners | 67.1% | 52.0% | 58.5% | -8.6% |
| Rangers | 51.6% | 60.8% | 56.3% | 4.7% |
| Athletics | 41.5% | 47.2% | 44.4% | 2.9% |
| Astros | 11.0% | 8.8% | 9.7% | -1.3% |
| Angels | 1.0% | 2.0% | 1.6% | 0.6% |
The story here is that the Mariners have gotten off to a slow start, not that anyone in the rest of the West has taken advantage so far. Our odds give them a huge chance of winning the division because we gave them a huge chance of winning the division in the preseason and not enough has transpired to change the math very much. The Bayesian model looks at the fact that they’re 23-26, not particularly close to their 88-win preseason projection, and leans on the season-to-date odds more heavily as a result. The season-to-date odds see a three-way race in the division. Blend that in, and you get the Mariners slightly out in front, but with the A’s and Rangers close behind.
This general shape – the preseason favorite comes out slowly, while the rest of the division is mostly business as usual – is where the Bayesian model picks up most of its relative value. The FanGraphs projection playoff odds model has a specific weakness: It’s sometimes too certain of playoff likelihood early in the year. The season-to-date playoff model often has the opposite problem. The Bayesian model sorts through those shortcomings in a reasonable way, and it’s easiest to notice when the division is bifurcated like this.
NL East
| Team | FG Playoff% | S2D Playoff% | Bayesian Playoff% | Bayesian – FG |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Braves | 96.2% | 96.8% | 96.5% | 0.3% |
| Phillies | 63.9% | 22.2% | 42.1% | -21.8% |
| Mets | 28.9% | 12.4% | 19.3% | -9.6% |
| Nationals | 1.7% | 23.3% | 13.8% | 12.1% |
| Marlins | 4.3% | 16.5% | 10.6% | 6.3% |
Oh man, this is a fun one. I’m truly not sure what to think about the Phillies, the team with the largest downgrade in playoff odds using this system. You can completely understand what the FanGraphs odds see. It’s a team full of stars who project like stars. We think the Phillies will have the fifth-best offense and the second-best defense/pitching combination over the remainder of the season. They’re not even below .500 now! Sounds like a surefire playoff team to me.
The thing is, the Phillies haven’t really played like that elite team this year. They’ve been outscored by 19 runs, and they’re scoring fewer runs than average while allowing more runs than average. I’m fascinated by this divergence. We don’t really have enough history to test situations exactly like this very often. The Phillies have played quite poorly in 2026, but they’ve also gotten lucky in the early going – they have a winning record. If they’d played to their run differential so far, the FanGraphs odds would be much lower on them. But the FanGraphs odds don’t consider the recent past, aside from how it feeds into player projections. They just start with today’s record and project forward.
I’m truly not sure whether the Bayesian method will handle this well. It has inherent limitations here, and it’s also built on regressions. Philadelphia falls into a potential hole in the model – there aren’t a lot of teams projected as well as the Phillies who scuffle early to begin with, and few of those outperform their run differential en route to an above-.500 record while doing so. This model is a little better than the FanGraphs model, but there’s a lot of irreducible uncertainty when it comes to projecting playoff teams.
The Mets, naturally, take a small hit here. The Marlins and Nats get a boost from their early play. None of that seems wild to me. But that enormous gap between how the different methods see the Phillies is really interesting – and to me, it says that the Phillies themselves are really interesting as a result.
NL Central
| Team | FG Playoff% | S2D Playoff% | Bayesian Playoff% | Bayesian – FG |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brewers | 71.0% | 91.1% | 82.3% | 11.3% |
| Cubs | 69.8% | 65.3% | 67.3% | -2.5% |
| Cardinals | 33.4% | 49.0% | 42.6% | 9.2% |
| Pirates | 37.6% | 33.7% | 35.7% | -1.9% |
| Reds | 9.5% | 10.4% | 10.0% | 0.5% |
Oh look, FanGraphs odds were too low on the Brewers before the season, what a surprise! I’ve written about this before. Our odds seem particularly ill-suited to projecting the Brewers because the places where they find edges are generally not well-modeled. Baserunning, defense, the combinatorial effects of baserunning and low-strikeout batters; we don’t do a great job handling these factors, and we know it. The Bayesian model has that covered, though; the Brewers are outperforming the projections, so it simply looks at the projections less.
The Cubs aren’t the losers here, though. They’ve played almost exactly like we expected them to. The Cardinals have exceeded expectations. There’s really nowhere to subtract in the division. That’s why the Central is the division that adds the most cumulative playoff odds when moving from a projection model to a Bayesian one. These teams have been great so far, while their playoff competitors have scuffled. That explains the odds change very well.
NL West
| Team | FG Playoff% | S2D Playoff% | Bayesian Playoff% | Bayesian – FG |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dodgers | 98.7% | 95.1% | 96.9% | -1.8% |
| Padres | 45.7% | 49.2% | 47.8% | 2.1% |
| Diamondbacks | 32.4% | 30.1% | 31.2% | -1.2% |
| Giants | 6.8% | 2.7% | 4.4% | -2.4% |
| Rockies | 0.0% | 2.2% | 1.1% | 1.1% |
Boring! But really, what can I say? Most of these teams are who we thought they were. The Giants, the only exception to that, have dug themselves a hole so deep that regardless of what odds system you use, they’re unlikely to make the postseason. When priors match observations, Bayesian inference looks at the result and mostly leaves the priors alone. Seems good to me.
How This All Works
I tested out a number of different Bayesian approaches when designing this study. The one I used here is the simplest of those methods, though none of them are that simple. I broke the season up into months. For each month, I built a pool of candidate weightings to give each model. More specifically, I varied “how much to trust the prior (the FanGraphs odds)” and “how much a deviation from the prior should change the model’s opinion.” I then tested each of these candidate weightings on prior years to see which had done the best, and selected final weights for each month based on that.
This is a regression-based model, which means it’s tuned based on what has actually happened rather than a first-principles approach to how much each model’s input matters. That’s an inherent limitation, because past performance may not be indicative of future results. But on the other hand, regardless of how I’m picking the weights, I’m testing everything out of sample first. In other words, I’m building my model through 2017 and testing it on the 2018 season, rebuilding it that year and testing it on the 2019 season, and so on. This Bayesian model beats our two existing models; it reduces error by about 2.4% compared to our FanGraphs odds.
With those weights in hand, my Bayesian method calculates each team’s odds by looking at their form so far in this season, accounting for schedule, and comparing it to their preseason FanGraphs-projected winning percentage. The larger the disagreement, the less weight the model puts on the FanGraphs odds and the more it uses the ones based on season-to-date play. It’s as simple as that. You could design a more complex way of handling this, but I like that this one is relatively straightforward. Look at the two, re-weight your priors based on the information you’ve received, and move on.
I’m not saying that you should take these odds as gospel, to be clear. Playoff odds have inherent limitations. We’re still just guessing about the future. But if you’re looking at FanGraphs odds and wondering why the White Sox can’t get any respect even with the fourth-best record in the American League, well, our odds have historically had a problem with underrating teams like that. This is my best guess at a solution.
Ben is a writer at FanGraphs. He can be found on Bluesky @benclemens.
My goodness…Royals with the lowest playoff odds for the AL Central and by a good bit? IDK man, it seems like head rolling time perhaps in KC.
Royals are 244-291 under Picollo and that’s excluding the 2022 season he took over in-year. Even just looking at 2024-2026, it’s 188-185, which seems okay but you’d expect more from a team with a bonafide top 2-3 players in the league with Witt Jr.
Their inability to develop or acquire any semi-competent outfielders players to fill out the back half of the lineup has been the fatal flaw that’s carried through that time, in my opinion.
They were 30th in OF WAR in 2025, 27th in 2024, 23rd in 2023, and 19th in 2022. They are actually 16th so far in 2026, but a lot of that is coming from some extreme batted ball luck from Kyle Isbel, so I wouldn’t expect them to remain that highly ranked (although Caglianone’s talent may be good enough keep them out of the depths this year).
There have been other problems with the team for sure, but probably none as bad as their inability to field a competent outfield. I have been baffled by this for years as I’ve watched the team and they haven’t been able to fill even one outfield slot with a ~2 WAR regular, or find a platoon arrangement to eke out more production.
Weirdly Isbel and Jac have been good this year. Somehow even Starling Marte has been competent. It’s that they’re running out Salvador Perez and Vinnie Pasquantino every day and they’re only getting on base a quarter of the time.
The bullpen hasn’t been helping either.
I’m a believer that Jac can be solid for them going forward, the bat is coming around and he’s improved in the field over the last year.
Isbel I also don’t even dislike as a player, he would be a fine glove-first 4th-5th OF, but everything points towards regression with the bat so I think he’s stretched as a starter. Marte is also running a .412 BABIP, so I think that’s a bit of a mirage as well.
I liked the Collins pickup because the cost was so low, but he’s been roughly replacement-level this year so no dice. Lane Thomas also hasn’t been good. It’s just kind of incredible how, over the years, they’ve tried a lot of these Collins or Thomas-type acquisitions and nothing has worked for them.
If someone is buying Isbel’s current batting average and needs a center fielder at the deadline they should trade him to them. He is stretched even as a platoon center fielder, he’s got a career 85 wRC+ against right handed pitching.
If a team has to live with a no-hit CFer Isbel is a decent one because the defense is so good, but the Royals should be trying to get more out of CF than he can be expected to provide. It’s hard to find quality center fielders though.
I looked this up the other day, there are only three teams since 2016 that haven’t had a season with a wRC+ of at least 100. That’s the Reds (98 highest), Royals (97), and Rockies (94). Every other team has had at least a 101 wRC+ one season.
Seems like that streak is going to continue this year for all three teams.
The Royals offense had a 93 wRC+ and their moves were basically just adding Lane Thomas and Starling Marte and trading for Collins.
Sure you can bake in some hopeful positive regression from Caglianone (who has been better) and productive play from rookie Jensen. But was that going to all be worth 7%+ wRC+?
Just eyeballing the FG projections from pre-season
That’s 11 hitters projected to be about league average or better…but that seems pretty rosey to me for a squad that had 5 hitters last year as roughly league average or better (min 100 PA) and one of them was Adam Frazier.
It felt like too much relying on the projections rather than relying on solidified moves. And banking on that most of it goes right rather than wrong like Perez/Pasquantino/Collins so far.
Just another season in a long running list of poor offenses and it’s hard to see them breaking that unless they acquire real needle moving hitters via trade/FA/draft.
Looking at those projections, I would’ve quibbled a bit with Marte, perhaps, possibly India. Most of the rest were right around where I would have pegged them.
Perez seemed like he’s been teetering on the cliff for about half a decade now — putting him at a SLG-heavy 101 felt like the right balance, but it looks like the cliff may finally be winning.
Just a bit of underperformance from most of the rest of the roster and no real overperformers means the Pasquantino/Perez double whammy has sunk the offense entirely.
I’m going to admit that I have no idea what this means. What is a “solidified move”? Pretty much everyone who’s changed teams across the league have been worse — significantly so in some notable cases. The only players in the top 30 in wRC+ who switched teams were Murakami and Brandon Lowe. Schwarber was nominally available, but that…wasn’t going to happen. Top 60? You only add a couple of more. Taylor Ward might have been a good fit, but I’m not sure if the Royals had something LAA wanted. Arraez has exceeded expectations (and who knows if that lasts) — we all knew he’d outproduce a healthy Kyle Tucker and a healthy Pete Alonso, right?
They should be relying on the projections to some degree, otherwise you’re just paying for what someone has done before, not what you can expect going forward.
Many of these guys don’t have a great track record of hitting well. Jensen and Cags were all projection. Pasquantino has never hit 119 wRC+ in his career outside of his rookie season in 2022. India was projected for a 105 wRC+ which would be better than he had been over the past three years. Collins just passed 500 career PAs this year. Perez was going to be a league average hitter – that 2024 season is carrying a lot of that weight. Loftin had a career 72 wRC+ and was projected for a 97 wRC+?
Projections have error bars around them and we are just looking at the 50th percentiles. But whose 50th percentile are you more confident in heading into the year? Witt Jr’s .368 wOBA or Caglianone’s .331 wOBA (using Steamer’s P50 projection)?
My thought was that the offense was too reliant on the confidence of the projections.
Looking again at Steamer percentiles, Witt Jr has a very tight and symmetric shape between P10 and P90. But Caglianone’s shape is flat and wide. 50th percentiles can be just the midpoint of two volatile extremes. But since we know the shape of Caglianone’s curve, we know that his 50th percentile projection is the least likely outcome you should actually expect. Whereas with Witt Jr, we know his P50 is far more likely.
There are four players with narrow curves (again using Steamer): Maikel Garcia, Bobby Witt Jr., Salvador Perez, Vinnie Pasquantino.
Three who are a little flatter: Kyle Isbel, Lane Thomas, Isaac Collins
Five who have flat curves: Jac Caglianone, Carter Jensen, Michael Massey, Starling Marte, Nick Loftin.
I’d argue that for everyone but the first four, their P50 is less meaningful and we should be looking at their tails.
I’d like for the Royals to have added some players with tighter curves and closer tails.
And the Reds and Rockies had seasons with wRC+ over 100 when you subtract pitcher hitting, so the Royals really stand alone.
I was so used to clicking the NP button on the dropdown for years, but I lost that instinct since the universal DH.
You’d think with their giant outfield they’d always have a plethora of good young fielders. They shouldn’t have anyone putting up negative DEF value in OF unless they’re absolutely crushing at the plate.
Sad thing is I really liked their offseason, thought they did a good job within their parameters of taking some bad positions & making them average. Which IS a way to improve, esp when you get 8-9 WAR from Witt & have decent SP (at least on paper).
Between them & Detroit both collapsing, it looks like the division is going to be a runaway for Cleveland.
I feel the same way about them as I do the Pirates. The Pirates have Paul Skenes through 2029 and the Royals have Bobby Witt through 2030. That means the Pirates have another three years after this one and the Royals have another 4 years before one of the best players in franchise history walks out the door. Skenes is maybe already the third best pitcher in Pirates history, and Witt is at least Top 5 in position players.
I don’t think there are any excuses for inaction at this point. I don’t see how the Royals can go on with Perez as anything other than a secondary catcher. Barring a major turnaround they can’t possibly run Pasquantino back out there at first base. And they need a real second baseman, an actual competent player opposite Jac in left field, and ideally someone like Varsho for center field as well.
I don’t have a clue how they get there–it’s not like they have a huge number of blue chip of prospects to trade. Even if they could find teams high on Kendry Chourio / Josh Hammond / Blake Mitchell I sincerely doubt the sorts of difference makers they would target (guys like Wyatt Langford or Wilyer Abreu) are going to be available. Beyond that, they actually spend a lot for their market size. Blowing it up is not an option. I have no idea how someone would solve this.
The answer just seems to be “hope for 2024 again” while Witt Jr is on the roster.
But part of that is that in 2024 they had pretty good injury luck and they landed on bingo with like alllll their pitching acquisitions and rotation/pen. Including a random 1.4 WAR season from Alec Marsh who was awful in 2023 and hasn’t pitched since 2024. They do seem to have some skill on the pitching side but in 2027 you are talking about a 37yo Lugo, 35yo Wacha, 29yo Ragans coming off of another injury filled year. Bubic is a FA, and Noah Cameron is a nice 5th starter.
Blowing it up isn’t an option unless blowing it up includes trading Witt Jr, because if not then what are you blowing it up for since he’ll be gone anyways by the time you compete again.
They are just going to have to either hit the jackpot in free agency or push the chips in and trade guys like Hammond/Churio/Mitchell at the detriment of what the 2030+ team looks like.
Maybe they can swing a medium trade for like a Zach Neto, Mickey Moniak, Isaac Paredes, Wilyer Abreu, Jung Hoo Lee, Heliot Ramos, Xavier Edwards, Otto Lopez, Dylan Beavers/Colton Cowser/Coby Mayo, Daylen Lile, Carlos Cortes, Spencer Steer, Garrett Mitchell. Whether that is trading some current SP to contending teams or prospects to rebuilding teams.
And then they are going to have to hit on a JJ Bleday, Miguel Andujar, Ryan O’Hearn, Luis Arraez type signing where they get a good production for a bargain.
Most of these guys aren’t band-aid types. I also can’t see the Nationals trading Lile at all.
Abreu, Edwards, and Neto would be the prizes out of this group, and also the least likely candidates to get traded because they are producing well for their current teams. If they were able to cash in Hammond, Mitchell, Chourio, and four of their FV40 prospects for Abreu and Edwards they should absolutely do that. I just don’t see it happening.
Vinnie P. still looks pretty good under the hood. I think they have to keep running him. Maybe they can swing a challenge trade that gets him into a better park for his hitting profile, but that’s going to look like a loser deal on paper. Like Vinnie for Bauers.
Why in the living hell would the Brewers do that? Bauers is literally in the top 30 hitters by wRC+ right now.
EDIT: Is there a different Bauers I’m forgetting about? Because no one would trade a dude running a 141 wRC+ for one running a 68. Like, what are we even talking about here?
Seems like a no-brainer to me. Vinnie’s likely the better player going forward, and even if you prefer Bauers by 10% or even 20%, you’re getting two additional control years from Vinnie.
Pasquantino’s expected stats are not great right now. If he hadn’t signed a two year deal he would probably be non-tendered. The Royals will be lucky to find someone to take the contract off his hands this offseason.
Bauers isn’t good either, but the Brewers can just let him go in free agency. The Royals need to find someone other player whose contract is about $5M underwater and swap them.
Right, anyone they would target to fix the holes would cost too much prospect or financial capital. The best stateside FA hitter so far has been O’Hearn, and I’m pretty sure the Royals wouldn’t have been on his list of places to go. Arraez would have been a nice pickup, but they felt pretty set with India.
Pasquantino was central to their core — reasonably could expect 10-20% over league average — and with his complete collapse this year, it really does make the whole thing not work. They had to be folding in some regression for Perez, and had to believe that a full fall off was possible — which is why the timing of Jensen’s ascension really did work out well for them.
But Pasquantino putting up a <10th percentile season is really an outcome they could ill afford. At least an injury, you go “that’s tough luck” but you feel like you’ve still got a core piece. But he’s currently 161st out of 173 qualified hitters in wRC+.
Even the Royals counting on Vinnie to be an everyday guy is a little dubious to me.
Vinnie P is a player who can help you win in my book, but he really should be a strong-side platoon 1B/DH guy, not an everyday player.
Career against RHP: 1515 PA, 122 wRC+
Career against LHP: 480 PA, 75 wRC+
2025 this was pretty stark, he had a 132 wRC+ against RHP in 518 PA, and a 63 wRC+ against LHP in 164 PA. He is probably a 2+ WAR player last year if you just give literally any halfway competent RHH 100 of Vinnie’s PAs against lefties, and the team is better for it.
This year Vinnie has a wRC+ of 99 in 144 PA against RHP. Not good, certainly, for a bat-only contributor but not a complete disaster. But Vinnie is rocking a wRC+ of -11 (yes, negative) in 57 PA against LHP, that is truly apocalyptic for a guy whose contributions are entirely bat.
But the Royals have determined that Vinnie should play everyday, so he does.
I love everytime I see the Bayes’ Theorem mentioned. That has been such a game changer in how I view the world.
Love that modest bump for the Rox… ‘so you’re saying there’s a chance!’
One of the comps for Munetaka Murakami being thrown around before he signed was Kyle Schwarber right now they #1 and #2 in HRs. For the month of May to date Murakami is getting on base more often and improved at the plate which is scary. I’m looking forward to finding out how he does over the course of the season but wow is he making teams look foolish.
And literally everyone in the organization has been saying the most impressive thing about him is his work ethic. Followed by his mental consistency. Can’t emphasize enough how great that is for a young team.
I like how the AL is so bad that the Twins can start 22-27, project to have a losing record the rest of the way, and the season-to-date model gives them a projection to make the playoffs that is ten percentage points higher than the FG model.
I suspect that this is a good placebo test for “how much of this is really the White Sox, and how much of this is the AL being terrible?” The season to date model says the Rangers are over a 60% chance to make the playoffs and they’re below .500 currently. They are over ten percentage points higher than the Cardinals in the season to date model and the Cardinals’ winning percentage is over 100 points higher.
Digging into this deeper: The Reds have a -33 run differential so far and have gone 16-8 against the American League. I think that his is mostly a situation where they’ve owned the American League but they’ve gotten killed by the Pirates (I think they’re -27 against them on the year).
But this isn’t a rock-paper-scissors situation where the AL is good against the Pirates. The Pirates have also been good against the AL (in small samples). Instead they’ve been wrecked by the Cardinals…who also have a winning record against the AL.
There are only three teams in the NL that have a losing record against the AL this year: The Marlins (6-12), the Giants (3-9), and the Cubs (7-8). There one AL team with a winning record against the NL (the Guardians).
Dropping to .500, you add two more teams: Yankees and Rangers. One under is TB and the A’s.
Two thirds of the league is at least two games under .500 against the NL.
Guardians are 8-7 against the NL and every NL team they’re played is above .500 with a combined record of 145-98 (Red, Cards, Cubs, Braves, Dodgers). That’s not bad…
Which means, yes, the Rockies are still above .500 against the AL (7-5 against the Jays, Astros, and Rangers).
re: the Phillies, check out their team-level BABIPs. And, I’ll give you a hint, these figures were MORE extreme under Thomson.
Offense: .269 BABIP, 3rd-worst (worst is .265 SDP)
Defense: .331 BABIP, worst (2nd-worst is .310 BAL)
The Phillies do have a few low-BABIP hitters, but we should be seeing Marsh cancel out Schwarber (he has), Turner should cancel out Adolis (nope!), and the rest should shake out to league average (nope!!).
On defense, Bohm’s become a fine defender, Turner’s bounced back to passable (and straight up good last season), Harper suddenly looks bad (was good in years past), Garcia replacing Casty is like +15 runs, Crawford’s a bit of a problem. Stott and Marsh are good! It doesn’t add up to a BABIP miles-worse than the next worst team. Should be around league average.
Your Bayesian analysis isn’t designed to consider these factors, but they explain the negative run differential and the gap between a player-based analysis vs. team-wide results analysis.
Their defensive underperformance by xBA and xwOBA would be the largest in at least this decade — they’re currently at +.025 in BA-xBA and +.022 in wOBA-xwOBA.
Per FRV, Stott and Garcia are the only non-catchers on the positive side of the ledger and Harper is just brutal (-5).
The offensive side is much closer to the expected numbers, but they’re still off a bit (notably, league wide slugging is about .012 under expected stats — it’s less extreme for BA and wOBA).
FWIW, Tampa is overperforming by their xwOBA (allowed) by 26 points and xwOBA (for) by 18 points.
I think you could make a case that the White Sox winning is actually somehwat sustainable. Yes, they’ve been outscored on the season, but most of that is a remnant of them being completely dominated in a three-game sweep in Milwaukee to start the season. Since then, they are 5 games over .500 and have a +8 run differential. I’d be more inclined to bet on a very young core playing ahead of their projections than I would if a bunch of random vets were outperforming their projections.
So you believe the White Sox will overperform and the Phillies will not? Well maybe. For one thing younger players, at least position players seem to get hurt less. Old guys can fall off a cliff suddenly.
The very best Phillies – Sanchez, Harper, Wheeler, Duran and Luzardo seem solid, and they should be enough as long as they’re healthy and everyone else isn’t horrendous.
The very best White Sox – Montgomery, Murakami, Martin, Antonacci, Vargas, and Taylor seem more iffy. They do have Teel.
The AL competition is terrible. Saying the White Sox have a 30% playoff chance, and the Phillies 40% may be underrating the Phillies if anything.
There’s also much bigger error bars projecting young players, between player development and uncertainty in how a guy’s game translates to MLB. E.g., Montgomery changes his swing ~11 months ago and now hits like lefty Pete Alonso… but somehow his 40 glove at SS is playing like a 70 per defensive metrics.
No idea what’s gotten into Martin. The ride is sure fun, though.
the NL Central turning into what the AL East was expected to be is a pretty funny twist
And the AL East turning into the NL Central with the Rays playing the role of the Brewers and the Yankees as the Cubs is a little too on the nose.
I think it’s a little blasé to blow off CHW. For one, their run differential would be positive on the year if you threw out the very first game of the season!
Secondly, the reasoning of “well several guys are outperforming their preseason projections” is a little silly when (1) it’s a lot of rookie/pre-arb guys, there’s gonna be genuine true talent level fluctuations, and (2) the Statcast metrics think several of those guys, like Vargas and Antonacci, are doing great yet still significantly *underperforming* what they ‘deserve’.
I also think Murakami is like the last guy on Earth that I would trust preseason projections on. NPB is the second-best league on Earth but its environment & metagame is very different from MLB, unlike say AAA. The ball is smaller and tackier and deader, the strike zone wider, the velocity lower… and the concern was Murakami would be hopeless against velo. He’s swung and missed lots but destroyed velo upon contact. It’s not an issue.
Okay but if you got a chance to throw out every team’s worst game like that then every team that is less than 12 runs ahead of the White Sox (the Twins, Mets, D-Backs, Marlins, and Athletics) would also get a chance to throw out their double digit losses and they would be ordinally in the same place.
They didn’t say throw out their worst game, they said throw out the first game. Makes sense that temporally things have changed a quarter of the way in as teams have had injuries, callups, and better understanding of their personnel.
Maybe but I have a hard time believing that Tristan Peters, Noah Schultz, Drew Romo, and Sam Antonacci together are worth 12 runs. It’s not like other teams also haven’t had those things!
You have to be real careful about throwing out part of the season because supposedly it isn’t relevant anymore. You can come up with all sorts of reasons why any team could have had a bad day. Maybe it’s the second game of a doubleheader, it came near the end of a long road trip, they were starting a now DFA’d pitcher, half their lineup was injured, etc. But it sure seems like the best explanation is they played a that was firing on all cylinders that game and they have played more average teams since.
The point is less ‘worst game’ than ‘first game’. 35% of the roster is different since then, including e.g. swapping out that Opening Day starter Shane Smith who struggled terribly to start the year (and is now hurt) for top-30ish prospect Noah Schultz.
Said negative run differential, opening day included, is not very negative (-12 after today’s one-run loss). They’re 25-24, and by Pythagorean they’d be 23-26… which would still be 2nd in the AL Central and in a WC spot at time of writing.
So the complaints about ‘sustainable’ are kinda overblown. They’re 9th in position player WAR and 18th in pitching WAR. Sure looks like a roughly .500 club to me… and a roughly .500 club snagging a WC spot w/ a 70th percentile season (~85 wins) looks entirely reasonable in an American League smelling like booty this year.
Their pitching has been incredibly lucky. They still have a bottom 10 staff in my opinion.
Sox fans are obsessed with throwing out the worst and saying we’re not so bad.
Previous, longer comment got eaten by the spam filter when I tried to edit a typo, but the White Sox went 6-13 with a 60-100 RD from March 26th – April 16th, and have gone 19-10 with a 154-125 RD since.
They’re also second in MLB in wRC+ and offensive WAR, and first in xwOBA during that period, and all their hitters have the expected (or defensive, in Tristan Peters’s case) to back up their performance so far. It seems possible that projections were just wrong, especially about Murakami and Montgomery, which wouldn’t be that surprising given that both of them took unorthodox paths to the majors.
Moreover, it’s worth noting that the Sox are still missing Kyle Teel, their projected most valuable player before the season, and that Antonacci hit at every level of the minors and is actually underperforming his expected stats (.402 xwOBA and .339 xBA – which are 96th and 100th percentile, respectively).
I’m loving Antonacci so much. For so many reasons. Where the hell did he come from!? I can’t recall the White Sox turning any other later round draft pick into a legit hitter. Won’t be shocked if he collapses any moment. But also, as you point out, he’s done nothing but consistently succeed. Having him at the top of the lineup is monster fuel.
And Peters is such a typical Rays guy, shocked they let him go. His D is for real. I love him on the team regardless of the bat… But he’s getting noticeably more and more confident, with 60/45 grades in hit/power potential.
Murakami is for real. And his work ethic and mindset is inspiring.
Montgomery is for real. Don’t sweat the projections – they’re low because of his unconventional minors history and because he’s relying on the Paredes pull the ball in the air.
Vargas seems legit as well. But he looked like this last year before a long cold streak. Need to see him continue. He certainly has elite ability.
Teel might not be an improvement over what Romo’s done. Can he keep it up? He’s shown way more power than his 30grade.
And speaking of discovering power, have you seen Jacob Gonzalez in Charlotte!?
I, like everyone else, was extremely skeptical of the Chris Getz hire, but despite some early missteps (and that I’m convinced he thought he was trading for Ronny Mauricio, not Acuna, lol), he’s done a great job staffing and modernizing the development system, and we’re seeing the benefits at both the minor and major league level. Making him GM was still an absolutely insane move, but it appears to be somehow working, and I don’t think Reinsdorf would have allowed an outsider to overhaul the organization to the degree Getz has.
And Antonacci just singled, stole second, and scored on a two-out bloop single. I absolutely fucking love him too, and I don’t think it’s coincidental that their hitting improved dramatically right around the time he was promoted. Murakami, Montgomery, and Vargas obviously get most of the attention, but he’s the spark that makes the whole offense go.
Getz has been a disaster. Working? Huh? Because they’re not historically bad for the first time in his 3+ year tenure?
He inherited the 2024 team.
And the baggage it came with like an empty farm with a poor track record, a guarantee not to pick higher than 10th, the worst analytics department in baseball, bloated contracts, and a cheap owner.
They’ve been the most improved team in the league 2 years in a row since.
While growing the farm.
People keep hammering on Getz in spite of everything right in front of their eyes. He’s hired good people from outside the org. The list is quite long. Beginning with Bannister on day 1 basically. Look at his AGMs, the coaching staff, the dev guys, the minors.
IMO Getz isn’t a genius but he’s hiring well and it’s getting results. And on a very small payroll. We’re seeing the farm actually developing players that compromise a lineup.
Twelve of his fifteen home runs have come at Truist Field, which is a the most extreme launching pad in AAA. It has very short outfield dimensions and the wind is usually blowing out, which is why the stadium averaged over three home runs per game last season.
FWIW, if the sudden explosion with the bats reminds anyone of the Orioles’ hitter prospect bonanza like 4-5 years ago, it might be because the Sox have hired a bunch of ex-Orioles hitting dev guys. They were largely let go 1.5 years ago when Baltimore had rather a counterrevolution internally against the New School for whatever reason.
Montgomery has elite bat speed and has bit balls 450+ feet. He’s nothing like Parades.
True. He does hit much harder than I thought.
I recall an average EV around 88mph last Summer. Looks like he’s been steadily raising it.
He also solidly lead the White Sox in HR/xHR last year, but I guess that wasn’t very telling.
I think my point still stands, though, that he repeatedly outperforms his expected stats by pulling the ball in the air much more than average.
Yes on Teel, but he just tweaked his knee while on a rehab assignment for the hammy and is out of action again for another 4 – 6 weeks.
I’d love to see the Dodgers and Padres division odds. Yes, it makes total sense that they’ll both make the playoffs, but FG is almost sure it’ll be the Dodgers winning the division.
Still underestimating my Nationals chances! We are the best offense by many runs right now! Ok, I’m sort of kidding. But we might be the most enjoyable offense of all time to watch. Seriously! We are never out of a game.
Pitching and defense matter too and they’re terrible at both.
It’s kind of crazy how the trajectories of the White Sox and Orioles have been running almost exactly inverse to each other for about 6 years.
Hopefully Chicago learned from why their window closed so quickly last time, because Baltimore absolutely did not take notes.
psst recently it’s because the White Sox hired away the O’s hitting gurus
Love this post, Ben. Great job. This is a big ask, but any chance we could get the Bayesian view as a Projection Mode in the Playoff Odds screen? Think it would be really interesting to track throughout the season.
Maybe! At some point, surely. I don’t think the methodology is nailed down enough just yet to be worth updating the odds until we have a few ideas for upgrades and this is done a little more rigorously. But we have been thinking about it for sure, and we like new odds methods – the Baseball Sim is one of my favorite tools of the year.