The Playoff Odds Think This Season Is Boring
How likely do you think the Reds are to make the playoffs? I’m not asking you to guess what our Playoff Odds say about them. I’ll tell you that in the next paragraph. I’m asking you to put your own number on it, based on what you know and think about both the Reds and the playoff picture. They are 59-54 with 49 games to play. They’re three games back of the Padres for the final Wild Card spot and four behind the Mets for the second spot. Got a number in your head? Then we’re ready for another paragraph.
Thank you for playing. As of this writing, our Playoff Odds give the Reds a 12.4% chance of reaching the postseason. I imagine that feels a little light to at least some people. Baseball Reference gives the Reds a 36.3% chance of making the playoffs. They’re within four games of both the Mets and the Padres. They’re also within five games of the Phillies, the first-place team in the NL East. If the Reds keep playing like they’re playing and any one of those teams has a late-season swoon, they’re in. According to Pythagorean Win-Loss expectancy, they should have the same record as the Mets right now and a better record than the Padres. They just added at the deadline. Hunter Greene looks like he’ll be back soon, and Elly De La Cruz sure looks like the kind of player who can put a team on his back for a couple weeks and carry it over the finish line.
Then again, I’m sure that number feels high to some people. You can understand why the numbers don’t like the Reds. Baseball Reference gives them such a high chance because it ignores roster composition, and, well, the Reds have a weaker roster than the teams ahead of them. They rank 22nd in position player WAR, and they didn’t add as much at the deadline as the Phillies, Mets, or Padres. In fact, according to ZiPS, they actually became 3.2% less likely to make the playoffs when the deadline dust settled, because of doubts about Ke’Bryan Hayes and presumably because the other teams added so much more. They’ve had the fifth-easiest schedule in baseball to this point in the season, and they’ve got the toughest schedule in baseball from here on out. They’ve overperformed their xwOBA by six points, the second-highest such gap in baseball. Not only do our projections have the Reds missing the playoffs, they have them finishing at 82-80, one game above .500 for the season and seven games behind the Padres in the standings.
This article isn’t meant to be a referendum on the Reds. I’ve been focusing on them to this point because they’re the only team in the National League whose Playoff Odds are between 10% and 85%. Let me say that another way. With a 12.4% chance of making the playoffs, they’re somehow the closest team in the National League to 50%. Here’s what that looks like in a table (specifically, the skinniest table you’ll ever see here at FanGraphs). Below is the entire National League, leaving out all teams with odds above 97% or under 3%, since they seem like more or less sure things. This is the entire playoff picture.
| Team | % |
|---|---|
| Mets | 91.9% |
| Padres | 87.8% |
| Reds | 12.4% |
| Giants | 6.6% |
| Cardinals | 5.7% |
That doesn’t leave a lot of teams, and even this group of five splits into two very obvious categories. It’s a battle over two spots, and the second-place team has an edge of about 75 percentage points on the club in third. We’ve got the Mets and Padres in line to get the final two Wild Card spots, and then we’ve got everybody else. The Giants and Cardinals just sold at the deadline. Even they’re not giving themselves a chance. The Reds and Padres are the only teams between 90% and 10%. If the Reds make the playoffs, it will be a big surprise, at least according to the robots who see the future.
Things are more equitable in the American League, but it’s still awfully stratified. The Red Sox are currently 2 1/2 games ahead of the Yankees in the Wild Card standings, but Boston has the third-best Playoff Odds (78.8%) of the teams not in first place, behind New York (85.1%) and Seattle (80.0%). The projections see the Rangers as the team likely to end up just out of the picture. The drop-off between the Red Sox and the Rangers is 40.6 percentage points, from 78.8% to 38.2%. Boston’s odds are more than twice as high!
This isn’t normal. On this date last year, six different teams had Playoff Odds between 40% and 60%. Two teams met that criteria on this date in 2023 and three teams in 2022. This year, the fourth season of this new extended Wild Card format, it’s zero. Our Playoff Odds go back to 2014, and even in the old Wild Card format, we never got to this point in the calendar with no teams between 40% and 60%. In fact, there were at least two teams in that situation in every season except 2019. This is shaping up to be the least competitive playoff race in recent memory. In theory, this new playoff format should make the postseason more accessible for more teams. The bar for entry is not much above .500, and lots of teams usually hang out right around .500. Maybe this year is an outlier, or maybe it’s what we should come to expect going forward, with the league split up so neatly into super teams and super tankers, buyers and sellers. If you sell at the deadline, you can tell your fans you’re building for the future. If you just miss the playoffs, you just failed, and you may not get all the credit you deserve for trying.
Before I leave you, I should give the obvious reminder that these are just projections. They’re good, but they’re not perfect. Lots of unforeseen things will happen. The Rangers look capable of making a run. The Reds have a one-in-8.1 chance of making the playoffs, and more improbable things happen all the time. The Tigers had a 0.2% chance of making the playoffs on this date last year, and you can still buy T-shirts commemorating what happened next. Even if nothing changes, there will still be battles. The Mets and the Phillies could duke it out until the last game of the season in the NL East. The AL East has three teams with a real shot. The Brewers and Cubs could make it close in the NL Central, and the Astros and Mariners could do the same in the AL West. Some of those races will affect who gets a bye and who doesn’t. It will be exciting. But none of that means that the projections don’t provide us with meaningful information. As far as who’s making the playoffs and who isn’t, it’s been at least 11 years since we’ve seen so little suspense at this point in the calendar.
Davy Andrews is a Brooklyn-based musician and a writer at FanGraphs. He can be found on Bluesky @davyandrewsdavy.bsky.social.
Perhaps it’s a quibble but this seems like a slightly baseball-writery definition of “boring.” Fans mostly care about their team, not about the general league-wide unpredictability of the playoff picture. E.g. as a Mets fan, I care a lot about the stretch run and the divisional race, because whether the Mets are a wild-card team or not (as you’ve preemptively assigned them) significantly affects their playoff picture. I’m also a general-baseball fan, enough to understand what you mean with the “boring” qualifier, but for me and I think most others, Team Entropy is a secondary loyalty, not a primary one.
Agreed! And of course there are other ways to think about whether the season as a whole is exciting, like “on any given night, are there usually some match ups between teams that are trying?” Even if someone isn’t primarily rooting for either of those teams, a Mets-Phillies game promises to be a fun watch, despite the fact (even because of the fact) that both are likely to make the playoffs in some way or another.
Exactly. And it’s quite important, analytically, for a team in contention to be one of the top two division leaders by record, because those teams get byes.
This article is so needlessly curmudgeonly that I can only assume it’s a bit tongue-in-cheek.
The bye has shown to likely be more detrimental to a team than beneficial. It’s literally an even split of winning the divisional round for bye teams at .500.
I think the bye week can be beneficial, but the problem is the layoff is too long and the pitching advantage doesn’t really get setup because of the playoff schedule. Having a day off after the wildcard round followed by extra days off for travel during a series allows a WC #1 pitcher to start game 2 and game 5 if necessary.
So the pitching advantage isn’t really there and your batters take a week off.
Even if we grant the premise that getting a bye is detrimental, such that it flips you from a 60/40 favorite to a 60/40 underdog (which, I don’t think is anything even remotely close to reality), you’re still better off with a bye than having to play an extra series:
With bye: 100% advancing past wild card round x 40% advancing in LCS = 40% advance rate
Without bye: 60% advancing past wild card round x 60% advancing in LCS = 36% advance rate
And again, there is no way in holy hell a bye knocks 20% off your expected series win%, it was just done to make a point; namely, that even in this wackadoo reality you still fare better than having to play an extra series.
We really need to retire this premise for good. It helps illustrate how people don’t understand probabilities.
“Would you rather jump over 2 cars in a row or just one but you also had a big, but not TOO heavy lunch?”
No clue why I’m being downvoted, best guess is automatonic sheep.
No, it’s because you’re the kind of dude who has to tell everybody that you think the writer is being “needlessly curmudgeonly” like an attention-starved curmudgeon and then throws a fit and hurls insults because people thought you were being weird.
Also, while you’re trying to use big words to seem more rhetorically impressive, “automatonic” is not a word. An automaton is a unit that displays automata, or self-operation, which is to say, it is automatic. A word which I’m assuming you passed over due to its familiarity to you and the resulting impression that it would be unimpressive to use. Based on you calling people “sheep”, I’m confident that you’re one of those guys who is afraid of lots of words, especially ones that imply inclusion.