Despite the majority of teams very rudely not finalizing their place in the postseason pecking order until the last day of the season — shout out to the Padres and Cubs for figuring things out beforehand — the initial ZiPS game-by-game playoff odds for the Wild Card round are now live on the site. None of these projections are set in stone; things will shift around as we approach game time and get a better idea of roster configurations and starting pitcher plans.

Just to remind everyone, the ZiPS playoff model is rather different than the normal projections you see on the site during the regular season. From April through September, ZiPS needs to see the forest for the trees, but in a short sprint, we can focus more on the individual trees themselves. We can make educated guesses as to who is starting each game, what the lineups will look like, who is healthy and who isn’t, and so on. The ZiPS game matchup tool has a built-in lineup estimator that projects the line of every pitcher and hitter against every opposing hitter and pitcher, so there is no need to look at a team’s generalized offensive strength. The postseason also comes with the benefit of being able to run the full, more robust model of ZiPS rather than the simpler model used during the regular season, a compromise necessitated by the fact that projecting the entire league takes more than a day.

Is the model perfect? Of course not. All models are wrong, but some are useful. The approach I take has benefits in some very specific situations where a team’s seasonal record isn’t a good predictor of performance. For instance, in 2019 ZiPS saw the Nationals as being a far more dangerous opponent for the Dodgers than the conventional wisdom did by virtue of Washington’s ability to concentrate a very large percentage of the team’s innings in a few excellent pitchers. Read the rest of this entry »

A Padres-Cubs NL Wild Card Series ought to delight people who are 10 to 15 years older than I am; the Cubs were actually San Diego’s first playoff opponent, all the way back in 1984. Neither of those teams had too much staying power, but surely you’ve heard about Rick Sutcliffe becoming the greatest midseason trade acquisition ever, or the Iron Claw-like litany of personal tragedies that befell members of that Padres team later on. Tony Gwynn led a late comeback off Sutcliffe in the decisive game, and the Padres won the first pennant in franchise history.

The winner of this series will have quite a bit more work to do before it can start thinking about a World Series berth. Both of these teams have been locked into Wild Card berths but locked out of a division title for quite some time, which means they’ve flown under the radar to some extent down the stretch. Read the rest of this entry »