2020 Expanded Playoff Odds Are Here!
With the surprise news that the 2020 season will feature expanded playoffs, we’ve been scrambling all afternoon to get our playoff odds updated:
And we did it! Or, at least we think we did it, based on the following reporting earlier in the day, which gave us something of a head start:
Seeds 1-3 will go to the division winners based on record.
Seeds 4-6 will go to the runners-up based on record.
Seeds 7 and 8 will be based on record.
Thus, there is a possibility the third-best division winner actually plays a worse team than the two best division winners.
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) July 23, 2020
The updates we made include:
- Changing the total number of teams to 16.
- Winning the division title is now reported as “Win Div 1st.”
- The division runner-up is reported as “Win Div 2nd.”
- “Win Wild Card” now represents the probability that a team secures the seventh or eighth playoff spot in their league.
- In the Postseason section of the playoff odds, we’ve changed “Make LDS” to “Win WC Series.” They are equivalent, but now the only way for a team to make the Division Series is to win its Wild Card Series.
- We cleaned up the previous runs of the 2020 playoff odds to retain the following dates:
- 3/11/2020 — Original 162-game playoff odds
- 7/21/2020 — Final old-format, 60-game playoff odds
- 7/22/2020 — Preseason new-format, 60-game playoff odds
The big takeaway here is that the very best teams see their World Series odds decrease somewhat, and everyone else’s playoff odds increase significantly. Unless you’re the Orioles.
We just received some clarity about the tiebreaker rules, but haven’t implemented them just yet. Right now, ties are broken randomly. We will include the tiebreaker rules in the near future, and expect the impact to be minimal.
If something looks off, please let us know!
David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.
Legends.
Could you offer users the choice of toggling between underlying projections sets?
Not at this time, because we only run these on the combined ZiPS / Steamer projections, but I agree it would be interesting to see these for different projections.
Something is off… I’m getting two listings per team with very similar if not identical odds for each listing. And the teams that played today have indications that they’ve played two games (I. E. Yankees 2-0)
That should be fixed shortly.
Great work guys! I’m so glad to have baseball back and to have this fully armed and operation website at our disposal!
Relishing the fact that the Mariners have a 95 percent chance of still not making the playoffs, again.
Amazing that the Rockies aren’t at 100% with their 94 wins
It would be interesting to know the swing in odds for a WC team based on the old “1 game” rule vs the new “3 games all hosted by the higher seed” rule. That may be the basis for an article by one of the projection-meisters.