With just a weekend series (and maybe another game) left, there’s some potential for weirdness still to happen. I remember that a few weeks ago, Michael Baumann at FanGraphs ran an article, the gist of
which was, “the lack of playoff races means the system is working,” in the sense that if there are six playoff spots per league and there’s no fight for any division or Wild Card spot, then six is the “right” number of seeds because it plainly cleaves between “deserving” and “non-deserving” teams.
Well, that’s not really happening anymore, especially because all the teams beyond the top five in the National League are the bad kind of nasty. The Mets would have to run the remaining short table to finish with 85 wins, which… great playoff system you have there, MLB.
Anyway, let’s walk through some potential oddities slash rarities.
The Mets’ playoff odds peaked at 97 percent on August 27. They’re now at 68 percent. A few more missteps and the Mets could go from near-unity to unadulterated zero in the span of about a month.
On September 5, the Reds’ playoff odds sunk to one percent. The Reds battled to raise those to 12 percent in the span of a week, and they peaked at 44 percent three days ago. They’re down to 20 percent right now. It would be a reversal of the above, i.e., from almost-zero to heroes in less than a month’s worth of games.
The Diamondbacks are also a longshot, and with the season slipping away from them, they sold at the Trade Deadline. Their odds were below three percent, often approaching but not quite zero, for pretty much the five-six weeks after the Deadline. They’re only about 12 percent right now, but maybe they pull off a more compressed version of the Tigers’ turnaround from last year? The Mets and Reds will need to comply, too.
The Astros are in danger of a massive collapse. In some ways, it’s already happened. Still, their playoff odds are 25 percent right now, a massive fall from 98 percent on July 6, and more recently, 94 percent on September 17. The Astros are sorta the mini-Dodgers without the garish spending in terms of locking in success, so this is sort of bewildering, really.
The Guardians bottomed out around three percent playoff odds in late August and early September, but have gained about 91 percent in the span of 15 days. They kind of annoy me because they’re riding little other than a +11 BaseRuns total towards success, but it is what it is and there’s not enough time for them to get punished now. Maybe next year.
The Tigers, well, oof. If they miss the playoffs, it would be the collapse of recent history, and some kind of weird cosmic retribution for them pulling off what they did last year. They had unity playoff odds in early July, and were pretty much locks as far as any system was willing to award a “lock” of any kind in late August. They still have about an 80 percent chance to make it in some fashion, but they’ve also been losing so terribly that I’m not sure that 80 percent figure comforts anyone at this point.
Who ya got?
