Cranking Out the Post-Trade Deadline ZiPS

Even in a wackily truncated season like this one, the trade deadline serves as an important landmark in the playoff hunt. While players will still be released and signed, lose their jobs and get injured, the dramatic changes in team quality are largely over. For a projectionist such as myself, it also comes as a relief as I no longer have to worry about spending time crunching the numbers only to have a 14-player, three-way trade go down just after I file an article. The players teams have on their rosters now are more or less the ones they have at their disposal over the rest of the season.

Before we get to the division-by-division standings updates, let’s take a quick look at how the last few days altered teams’ playoff odds. I projected the rest of the season for each team based on both their roster prior to the deadline’s moves and their roster as it stands post-deadline. I then compared the results to see which club saw the biggest rest-of-season gains and losses.

The San Diego Padres were an excellent club prior to the deadline. They were already nearly assured of a playoff spot — under the 16-team playoff format, it’s very hard to move the postseason needle much when you’re already a top team and there simply weren’t that many playoff-missing scenarios for deadline additions to wipe from the timeline — but faced a difficult path to catching the Los Angeles Dodgers, who have a strong case for being the best team in baseball. The divisional bump is real for San Diego — their divisional chances got a bigger jolt than any other team — but even though their roster improved more than any other club’s, they don’t get the largest playoff or postseason gain in the projections. The reality is that winning a division in 2020 versus finishing second doesn’t really matter all that much, which is why you saw a lot of the coasting teams either only add a few role players or completely stand pat.

Instead, when it comes to playoff probabilities, the Blue Jays and the Marlins are the two teams that helped themselves the most. The Blue Jays have more upside now than they did a week ago, even if none of the moves they made are earth-shattering by themselves. Catching the Rays and Yankees is still a long shot, though it’s not impossible. The Jays have strengthened themselves relative to their biggest eighth-seed competition — oddly enough, the Detroit Tigers — and most of the long-shot American League Wild Card contenders got worse.

Acquiring Starling Marte is a bigger deal for the Marlins in a season like this simply because in most years, when teams make deadline additions, so does their competition. The Padres being better doesn’t really affect the Marlins that much and they receive a further boost by virtue of most of the rest of the National League having been fairly quiet in terms of additions.

Elsewhere, many of the game’s best teams took a passive approach to deadline. The notable exception was the Cleveland Indians, who by trading Clevinger, lost more projected divisional ground and World Series championship probability than any other team in baseball. Unsurprisingly, the explicitly retooling Diamondbacks suffered the biggest playoff loss; though they stand just 3 1/2 games behind the final NL playoff spot, the roster is much weaker after the trades. They could still theoretically fall into the eighth spot because weird things happen in baseball — such as last year’s Brewers playing better after the Christian Yelich injury — but more likely than not, Arizona’s long slump and injuries have doomed their season.

Now, to those updated standings!

Most of the action is in the NL, with seven teams in the AL already projected with at least a 90% chance of making the playoffs; there’s only about a one-in-six chance that any of the top seven teams in the AL miss the playoffs this year. The Blue Jays didn’t pick up any superstars, but they certainly recognized an extremely high-leverage situation when they saw one, so credit goes to them for that.

In the NL, only four teams have crossed that 90% threshold, which makes for a much more enjoyable slate of pennant races! Six teams project to have between a 25% and 75% chance of making the playoffs, while in the AL, only the Jays are in that range.

Of course, there are some things that ZiPS cannot know. For example, how many games will the St. Louis Cardinals actually end up playing? Will any other contenders suffer a COVID-19 outbreak? I honestly don’t know and if I don’t, the computer certainly doesn’t, either. So sit back, grab some tacos and a beer, and enjoy the penultimate act of the oddest season you’ll ever see.