Five Teams That Should Confound Their Playoff Odds

It was a bit of a weird assignment: “Hey, one of our most popular projections drops this week, would you mind telling everyone where you think it’s wrong?” Sure thing, bossman!

Joking aside, I get it. Playoff odds are probabilistic; if you asked me how many teams would miss their projected win total, I’d say half are going to come in high and the other half are going to come in low. They follow a set methodology that you can’t tweak if the results look off. That means the standings page is blind to factors human observers can see. It doesn’t know who’s getting divorced, who made a conditioning breakthrough over the winter, and who just really freaking hated the old pitching coach who got fired.

Nevertheless, these numbers are valuable because the projection system doesn’t mistake anecdotes for data and overrate the intangible. It’s a reminder to trust your gut, but only to an extent.

With that said, I want to be somewhat circumspect about what I mean when I say a projection is high or low. Every time preseason playoff odds get released — whether here or at another site — there’s a minor freakout over how conservative the projections look. Last season, 16 teams won between 70 and 88 games; our debut playoff odds this year have 26 teams in that band. That doesn’t mean we think only two teams are going to break 90, it means we don’t know which teams are going to have the good (or bad) fortune required to post an outlier win total.

So in general, where I’m quibbling with the playoff odds, it’s more about ordinal ranking than absolute value. It’s a better reflection of what I actually think, and more interesting than a list of teams I see winning 88 games instead of 85.

Orioles: Over 83 wins and 44.5% playoff odds
I said I was going to take the Orioles’ over before I even looked at the actual numbers. It’s become a meme at this point that projections systems hate the Orioles with a consistency that begs to be anthropomorphized.

And to be clear, I also have concerns about this team. They lost Corbin Burnes, and replaced him with two guys who are old enough to remember the last time baggy jeans were cool. Adley Rutschman looked real beat down the stretch. Top free agent signing Tyler O’Neill is polarizing, and count me among those who think he’s a non-trivial downgrade over the departing Anthony Santander. Kyle Bradish is probably not going to pitch this season. Maybe we’ve been spoiled by the ease with which young position players seem to take to the majors these days, but Jackson Holliday was total cheeks as a rookie.

I was in Baltimore for the total no-show in the Wild Card round last fall, and if we’re bringing vibes into this, I worry that the cheery, optimistic, youthful energy surrounding the Orioles is (and should be) evaporating. It happens to every team that does a hardcore tank and struggles to get over the hump in the playoffs, regardless of the sport. You turn into the Sixers or Maple Leafs real fast.

But even after all that doom and gloom, I think 83 wins, playoff odds under 50%, and third place in the division are borderline insulting. This lineup is still stacked. The rotation’s iffy, but so is every rotation these days. Félix Bautista is already in Sarasota. They signed Ramón Laureano while I was writing this, and that guy can throw the heck out of the ball.

A lot of the criticisms of this team have stood the past two seasons, when they won 101 and 91 games, respectively. If they end up around .500, something will have gone very, very wrong.

I’ll grant that the AL East is going to be competitive one through five, I just can’t put the Orioles behind a team that has a load-bearing Trevor Story.

Braves: Under 93 wins, 65.2% division title odds, and 14.9% World Series odds
The numbers don’t bother me much here. Whoever wins the NL East is probably going to win at least 93 games, and if I had to pick a favorite for the division right now, I’d probably go with Atlanta. The Dodgers are at 36.1% to win the NL pennant, with the Braves no. 2 at 24.6%. I think calling the Dodgers a 3-to-2 favorite in the deciding match of an NLCS trilogy against the Braves is about right.

The Dodgers and Braves are the only two teams currently projected to win more than 88 games, and five of the six top projected win totals belong to NL teams. I think that’s right as well; heading into the season, the NL looks much stronger at the top than the AL.

Are the Braves going to be good? Almost certainly. The best team in the NL East and second-best team in the NL? Probably. The second-best team in all of baseball? Possibly. Nevertheless, our playoff odds look like they’re out over their skis a little.

The Braves are roughly 2-to-1 favorites to win the NL East over the Phillies and Mets put together. Their projected win total, 93.5, is second in the league, and 5.9 wins ahead of third-place Philadelphia. That’s about the same as the difference between third place and 19th.

A 93-win campaign from Atlanta, or even a 100-win campaign, would not surprise me in the slightest. But it’d require more things to go right for the Braves than I’m willing to assume at this point: Relatively normal post-injury seasons from Ronald Acuña Jr. and Spencer Strider. A second consecutive Cy Young-quality season from Chris Sale, who turns 36 next month and hadn’t previously qualified for the ERA title since 2017. Another career year from Jurickson Profar. Bounce-back campaigns from Matt Olson, Austin Riley, and Sean Murphy, all of whom either got hurt or wore out in 2024.

And the indomitable Atlanta pitching development engine is starting to hiccup. A year ago I would’ve bet the farm on both Hurston Waldrep and AJ Smith-Shawver. Now, I’m starting to have doubts.

Maybe the Braves’ beefy projection says more about the Phillies, who ran back a team that looked old and creaky down the stretch. Or the Mets, who stand to give Jose Siri more playing time than an economic juggernaut should. Either way, I don’t expect this division race to be anything like this much of a walkover.

Tigers: Over 83 wins and 7.0% AL pennant odds
I’ve already mentioned the muddy middle of the projection curve, with 22 teams — 10 National League, 12 American League — slated for between 78 and 88 wins. All of those teams have somewhere between an 8.5% chance (the Reds) and a 54.5% chance (the Yankees) of making it to the Division Series. There is a subtle difference in how I find myself looking at these teams, depending on league. In general, I can talk myself into most of those 10 NL teams finding a way to be good. (Generally — I’m not holding my breath on the Pirates.) By the same token, I can talk myself into most of those 12 AL teams being bad.

Could Detroit be bad? Sure. This team needed a minor miracle to scrape into the playoffs last year, and hasn’t added much this offseason. Detroit’s lineup is still fetid with the odor of mistakes from the past, like signing Javier Báez and spending the no. 1 overall pick on Spencer Torkelson.

Nevertheless, Detroit has a sneaky good rotation, especially after pouncing on Jack Flaherty after his market collapsed. If Jackson Jobe turns out to be as advertised, I think I’d pick Detroit’s top three starters over Kansas City’s, and I might favor the Tigers over the Royals 1-5 even if Jobe is a bust. The Gleyber Torres signing was wonderfully opportunistic; I don’t love the player, but he’s a competent hitter, and the Tigers badly needed more of those. And where there are still holes, Detroit manager A.J. Hinch can work a platoon as well as any bench boss in the game.

Some goat is going to end up atop the AL Central trash heap. If that’s Detroit, I think Tarik Skubal and the rest of this rotation can take this team on a deep playoff run.

White Sox: Under 62 wins and 1×10^-4% chance of making the ALDS
It might shock you to learn that a team that set the major league record for losses in a season underachieved a little. Chicago’s Pyhagorean record was actually seven games better than their real-world record, which means that according to their run differential the White Sox should’ve gone… 48-114.

So let’s take that as a baseline and start with a question: Do you know who Penn Murfee is? He’s a 30-year-old reliever who had a good year for Seattle in 2022, after which he’s been waived or released six times since Halloween 2023. ZiPS has him projected for a 4.27 ERA, which is the lowest number for anyone currently on the White Sox pitching staff.

The worst team in modern history traded Erick Fedde, Tommy Pham, and Michael Kopech midseason, and jettisoned Garrett Crochet at the Winter Meetings. Their big free agent pickups have been Martín Pérez, Mike Tauchman, and Josh Rojas, which are the kind of names you’d run into during a particularly disappointing trade deadline from the Neal Huntington-era Pirates. I don’t think the White Sox will lose 120 games again, but I do think they’ll be a less talented team.

I just want to reiterate that projections are usually pretty conservative, so it takes some doing to get the machine to spit out a 100-loss prediction. Even so, I think our playoff odds are being too kind.

Giants: Over 80 wins and 0.9% World Series odds
The Giants are my team for the most cowardly prediction out there: Playoff sleeper. Apart from the NL Central title, there are five National League playoff spots up for grabs. The Dodgers are a lock for one, with the remaining four probably going to some combination of the Braves, Phillies, Mets, and Diamondbacks.

If none of those teams faceplant, that leaves some interesting teams out in the cold. The Padres won 93 games and took the Dodgers to the brink last year, but our playoff odds have them as an outsider, and I’m not inclined to disagree. Even beyond that, the National League’s strength up top leaves little room for a team that’s poised to make the leap.

So I’m going to make a bit of a milquetoast prediction that the Giants are going to be better than .500, but struggle to make the playoffs unless someone else trips up. Like most of you, I’m mostly morbidly fascinated with Buster Posey’s Flying Circus, and expect it to end in disaster eventually. But it’s easy to forget that while half-cocked, ownership-influenced baseball ops appointments usually flame out in the long-term, the immediate returns are often quite good. Everyone expected the White Sox to implode when Tony La Russa got hired as manager, right? And sure enough, they did, but not before TLR won a division title. I don’t care about what the back half of the Matt Chapman contract looks like, I care that the Giants have a couple elite defensive players, a lineup of guys who can dump the ball in the gap, and solid pitching depth.

Good enough to make the playoffs? Absolutely, if they can move to Indianapolis in the next six weeks. Otherwise, they might need a little help.