Welcome to the Race to the Postseason
After five months of slow and steady, baseball is about to shift into fast and furious mode. It’s almost September, which means the annual all-out sprint to the postseason is about to begin.
Unless it’s already happened, and we missed it.
The oddsmakers at FanGraphs seem to think the playoff picture is all but set already.
Entering play on Thursday, FanGraphs had six teams in the American League with a better than 74 percent chance of making the playoffs, and only one other with even a 20 percent chance of getting in. The National League is even more clearly defined with five teams having at least a 90 percent chance of making it, another sitting at just below 75 percent, and the only other serious contender having just a 25.3 percent chance.
Every other NL team has playoff odds in the single digits, which wasn’t true as recently as Aug. 1, when the day started with 19 different teams having at least an 11 percent chance of making the playoffs and a 20th — the defending champion Texas Rangers — having a 9.4 percent chance.
The playoff field, it turns out, might have a lot more to do with what happened the past five weeks than what happens in the next five.
American League playoff odds
There remain tight division races in the AL East and AL Central — and arguably the NL West — but those races are among teams that have a leg up in the wild card and don’t necessarily need a division title to play in October.
The New York Yankees (99.4 percent chance of making the playoffs), Baltimore Orioles (97.8 percent) and Cleveland Guardians (92.5 percent) are basically postseason locks in the American League, while the Houston Astros (90.3 percent) and Minnesota Twins (87.7 percent) are statistically safe bets. The Kansas City Royals currently hold the final wild card spot with a 75.1 percent chance of keeping it.
Elsewhere, the Boston Red Sox (39.1 percent) are the only other team truly in the running. The Seattle Mariners are down to 12.6 percent and the Tampa Bay Rays — who made a little bit of noise in July — are down to a 4 percent chance.
In the National League, the Los Angeles Dodgers (100 percent), Philadelphia Phillies (99.5 percent) and Milwaukee Brewers (99.3 percent) have all but clinched a spot in the postseason, while the red-hot-since-the-break San Diego Padres (95.1 percent) and Arizona Diamondbacks (92 percent) have catapulted into strong positions to join them.
The preseason favorite Atlanta Braves are decimated by injuries, but even they have a strong 74.6 percent chance of winning the final wild card spot. The only team meaningfully chasing the…
National League playoff odds
Such clarity really started at the All-Star break. Baseball’s best teams since the break are the Diamondbacks (23-8), Padres (22-7), Dodgers (20-11), Royals (19-11), Astros (18-12) and Brewers (18-11), and those six have shifted the balance of every nearly undecided playoff spot.
The Astros have thoroughly separated themselves from the Mariners in the AL West. Those two were within a game of one another at the break, but the Mariners have floundered for weeks and have a losing record even since the trade deadline despite making significant additions (the going-nowhere Oakland A’s have outplayed them in August).
The AL wild card race has long had one spot basically guaranteed …
(Top photo: Sean M. Haffey / Getty Images)
