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“If the Astros win 70 there might be a celestial event that has never been seen before.” —BP reader Old Bopper, here.

***

This week, we released our playoff odds, which are based on 50,000 simulations of the 2014 season. In 0.4 percent of them, the Astros win the AL West, and in 1.3 percent the Astros make the playoffs. This is a very small number, which is fitting, because it is practically impossible to imagine the Astros winning 80 games, let alone 90 (if not quite so impossible as Old Bopper suggests to imagine 70).

And yet, this number means that there actually exists a simulation of this baseball season where the Astros actually won more games than any other AL West team. They didn’t win 0.4 percent of the division in that simulation; they won the whole thing. Dozens of such simulations, in fact, exist, where this thing happened. And realize one thing: Yes, in all of them, the Astros overperform their projection, often dramatically. But most often crazy, weird freaking things happen to make it possible. The Astros, in their 600-plus playoff timelines, averaged 86 wins. Last year it took 92 wins to make the playoffs in the American League last year. In some playoff timelines, the Astros won considerably fewer than 86 games. So to make the playoffs, they had to steal a bunch of wins from other teams' projections; and they had to do it in an environment where 86 (or 85, or 82, and so on) wins were enough to make the postseason. These are insane seasons.

So let’s look at them.

We should be cautious. If coins create parallel timelines, and rock-paper-scissors is a nine-sided coin, then what is a baseball simulation? Naught but a 2,430-sided coin. We are opening up timelines here. Some of them are very, very dark. Wear goggles; bring weapons; pack a snack.

***

The Most Utopian Timeline: Simulation 33913
What makes it great: Astros win 99 games, the second-best season in franchise history, with a roster that enters the season with three total All-Star appearances (Castro, Altuve, and Crain, one apiece), a combined $35 million in salary, and a combined one Jesus Guzman starting at first base. Fifty-three years of Astros baseball, and this is the roster that wins 99.

Excerpt from game story the day after the Astros clinch: “…Sabathia threw a two-hit shutout, Mark Teixeira slugged a home run, and Derek Jeter scored three times, as all three Yankees acquired by Houston in New York’s August salary dump contributed to the…”

The Entropiest Timeline: Simulation 18224
What makes it great: Astros win 83 games to join a five-way tie for the first and second wild card spots (plus AL east division title). Best guess: Blue Jays and Rays have one-game playoff for division title; loser plays against Astros, A’s, or Tigers, while remaining two teams play each other; winner of each game will be wild card 1 and 2. Red Sox and Yankees, at 81 wins apiece, play vigorous two-team NIT tournament that nobody watches.

Excerpt from game story the day after the Astros clinch: “… but there was no celebration on the field. That’s because the Astros weren’t sure they had clinched a postseason spot until the team’s Decision Sciences department ran a series of complex mathematical models on the team’s new supercomputer and confirmed that, indeed, they were in. ‘I don’t know,’ GM Jeff Luhnow said. ‘They say we’re in, but I’ll wait and see whether we’re actually playing a game next Thursday before I get happy.’”

The AL Westiest Timeline: Simulation 49319
What makes it great: You’d imagine that most of these scenarios would involve the AL West’s four first-division teams underperforming, and either chucking extra wins to the Astros or setting a low bar for the Astros to clear for a playoff spot. But in this timeline, the other four teams are a combined 28 games over .500. PECOTA pegs those four teams’ true talent at about 14 games over .500—no doubt boosted by 76 games against a terrible Houston team—which means that in this timeline the Astros make the playoffs in a division where their competition is all playing out of its mind.

Excerpt from game story the day after the Astros clinch: “‘…I try not to pay much attention to the stats. I’m just happy the team won,” Peacock said after the shutout. ‘But, yeah, it feels pretty cool to be a 30-game winner.’”

The AL Worstiest Timeline: Simulation 33881
What makes it great: The Astros win 82 games but take the AL West by seven games. There are other timelines where the Astros win with 81 games, but none where the West is just so, so bad: A combined 34 games under .500. The average AL West team in this timeline (excepting the Astros) underperforms by 12 wins.

Excerpt from game story the day after the Astros clinch: “‘Wooooooooo!’ Castro cheered as his teammates doused him with beer. ‘Everybody sucks except us!’”

The Paritiest Timeline: Simulation 3540
What makes it great: The Astros win 86 games and have the best record in the American League. And, just as no team wins more than 86, only two teams win fewer than 79. Twelve of the 15 AL teams finish within six games of each other; put in context, only two divisions last year were won by five or fewer games.

Excerpt from game story the day after Astros clinch: “…but when baseball made the rash decision to play every game of the season on ice, it put all teams on equal footing—or, rather, equal lack of footing.”

The Cruelest Timeline: Simulation 17511
What makes it cruel: The Astros win 93 games and are the third-best team in baseball, just one game behind the A’s and one game behind the Dodgers. It's a spectacular achievement. The Astros are America’s scrappy underdogs, and by the 93rd win they’ve certainly proven they’re for real and they belong. And yet, because of that one extra Oakland win, they’re stuck with the Wild Card and almost certainly lose the coin-flip game to the friggin' Yankees. Worst sport, this one.

Excerpt from game story the day after Astros clinch: “…but Luhnow seemed conflicted as, in exchange for one extra playoff game, his team had sacrificed the chance to get the first pick in the 2015 draft.”

The Most Overall WTF Timeline, Third Place: Simulation 19317
What makes it overall WTF: Astros, Padres, Blue Jays win their divisions, but mostly it’s this: The Dodgers win 73 games. In the 637 timelines where the Astros make the playoffs, the Dodgers finish under .500 about 10 times, but only once do they lose fewer than 76 games. (In simulation 19054, the Dodgers win 111 games and take the NL West by 27 games.)

The Most Overall WTF Timeline, Second Place: Simulation 5117
What makes it overall WTF: Astros, Marlins, and Rockies tie for the most wins in baseball. Dodgers, Red Sox, Cardinals, Tigers miss the playoffs. Twins miss playoffs by two games; Cubs by one.

The Most Overall WTF Timeline: Simulation 36845
What makes it overall WTF: The Astros win the division. The Cubs win the division. And, with 81 wins, the Marlins win the division. There’s a one-in-eight chance of an Astros/Cubs or Astros/Marlins World Series matchup here. Shoot, the Royals are in there, too, so it’s a one-in-16 chance of a Royals/Marlins matchup. Incidentally, written language is like 5,500 years old, so to find this timeline we had to run seasons for nine times longer than writing has existed, just FYI for your records or whatever.

Excerpt from game story the day after Astros clinch: “…but the Astros’ excitement was muted. ‘We’re still suspicious of the whole thing,’ manager Bo Porter said, repeatedly looking up warily at the rafters to make sure there were no buckets of pig blood above him.”

And, finally:

The Darkest Timeline: Simulation 14761


What makes it dark: The Astros make the playoffs with 80 wins, securing a three-way tie for the second wild card spot. Meanwhile, the Red Sox, Rays, and Angels finish with 79 wins. On the surface, this is the greatest scenario imaginable. Going into the final day, or final two days at least, there are six mediocre teams vying to become the first team ever to make the playoffs with a losing record; and, having played out the final game, remain locked in a three-way tie that will require two one-game playoffs to determine who will play in a one-game playoff to determine who will play in the real playoffs; all the while leaving the highly compensated Red Sox and Angels out of the playoffs while the Astros, Twins, and Blue Jays move on as cinderellas. They’d call this the greatest final week in history.

But at what cost? We’re all anarchists when we’re young, until we start to realize that we do need certain things to be structured: we need doctors who have been licensed, educated at state-subsidized universities, and provided medicine developed by government grants and screened by government agencies before being shipped in a timely manner via government-built roads and provided to senior citizens who are cared for, in an extraordinary act of collective altruism, by the government of us all. When the social structures begin to break down, it is exciting, it feels mischievous, and it tickles the rebellious youth in us all, but ultimately it leads to darkness and fear, to the timeline where we are all on our own. We can’t do it on our own. We need order, structure, and sensibleness.

And so there’s something about a timeline where the Astros, a team we know, for an absolute fact, to be worse than at least one of the Rays, Angels, and Red Sox, not only get to play in the playoffs instead of those three teams, but get to do it despite winning only 80 games—in other words, despite being demonstrably bad at baseball—and where this terrible team might even win the World Series, that leads humanity to no happy terminus. This is the timeline where your teenage daughter applies to the university she worked so hard to get into, but instead of getting accepted she gets arrested for treason. This is the timeline where your wife stabs you because you said something in your sleep, where your mother uses your birth certificate to steal your identity, where you beg to be arrested because jail is the only place you ever feel safe. We don’t want this timeline.

God and math willing, none of us will live long enough to see such a thing.

Excerpt from the game story the day after the Astros clinch: “…in a loud voice to him who was sitting on the cloud, ‘Take your sickle and reap, because the time to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is ripe.’ So he who was seated on the cloud swung his sickle over the earth, and the earth was harvested.”

***

Totals
The Astros made the playoffs 637 times. Here's how many wins it took to get there.
99: Once
95: Once
94: Once
93: 10 times
92: Four times
91: 12 times
90: 22 times
89: 43 times
88: 52 times
87: 71 times
86: 96 times
85: 125 times
84: 73 times
83: 80 times
82: 33 times
81: 11 times
80: Twice
Thanks to Rob McQuown and Dan Brooks for assistance and encouragement.

Thank you for reading

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Kongos
3/21
Fun that you ran this the same day you ran the Pre-Season Predictions. The predictions seem so ... predictable. This is an antidote to that; a nifty reminder that things can be utterly unpredictable.
alvinfan
3/21
Can we get some stats for these seasons? Please, maybe?

I mean, I could go and boost everyone in OOTP and see if it happens, but your randomness is better.
boatman44
3/21
Astros win the world series !!!

Dallas Keuchel wins the A.L Cy Young

Japhet Amador is rookie of the year after coming up in June and hitting 47 moonshots while eating a chicken leg at the plate.

Jonathan Villar wins the triple crown getting his 48th home run in the last week to squeak out Amador, he also steals 81 bases to beat Billy Hamilton by 1.

As an aside,at the G8 summit of October 2014, the worlds major powers decide to spend their defence budgets on flower arranging instead.
boatman44
4/06
Ah ha Villar just got his first :)
jdeich
3/21
PECOTA also confirmed that in the darkest timeline, the Astros all sport pencil-thin mustaches and pointy goatees.
Johnston
3/21
I must have missed it somewhere, but what simulator did you use?
Skuggs
3/21
Just wanted to say that this was an exceedingly enjoyable read, and that I totally believed the first newspaper article was real, like something from Baseball Mogul.
Oleoay
3/21
Ah, Baseball Mogul. Loved that game until I got into OOTP but played it early on for a few years. According to the developer, I was the first person to beat Casey Stengel which they thought was impossible.
markincincy
3/23
OOTP is the best baseball sim on the market...hands down
Oleoay
3/24
Even the mobile app is pretty decent.
swarmee
3/21
Are those numbers next to the number of projected wins "winning percentage" in the tables? Because 99 wins out of 162 games does not a .430 winning percentage make.
lyricalkiller
3/21
It's the true talent winning percentage that the simulator assigned the team going into each simulation. (there's a tiny bit of fluctuation from sim to sim, but basically those numbers by each team are the same in all the tables.)
Oleoay
3/21
It'd be nice to know how the various timelines did what they did. What had to break right for the Astros to win 99 games, etc. When the Astros broke 90 wins, were there any players common to those timelines that always exceeded expectations?
terencem
3/21
Important question: Did Javier Baez hit 74 HR in any season?
yadenr
3/21
As noted above in the comments, is it a teamwide simulation or does it account for individual players? Would LOVE to see the statistics from that 99 win season, or engage in some BP roundtable speculation of what that might have looked like.
bornyank1
3/21
Teamwide sim, so no stats for individuals. Let your imagination run wild.
Oleoay
3/22
Secretly, we've switched L.J. Hoes with Barry Bonds. Let's see if anyone notices the difference.
Johnston
3/22
Yes, but which sim?
Oleoay
3/24
I would've thought PECOTA might've been involved in the simulation...
iorg34
3/21
What was the lowest number of wins in the Astros sim run?
BurrRutledge
3/23
Seriously would like to know this... they average 94 losses in the 50,000 scenarios, but do they approach the 1899 Spiders, the 1962 Mets, or the 2003 Tigers?
mcquown
3/24
In three of the sims, Houston won only 46 games.
BurrRutledge
3/25
Thanks, Rob. Puts it in perspective.
aschatz
3/21
This is so awesome I am beside myself and I am totally stealing this for the 2014 NFL season.
mrenick
3/21
so you're telling me there's a chance....yeah!
oldbopper
3/22
Since I was ridiculed for suggesting that the sun would rise in the west if the Astros win 70 games, and I understand a bell curve as well as most, it would be fascinated to see projection of the fewest wins the Astros might have in 2014. Perhaps they can challenge the 1899 Cleveland Spiders record of 20-134. From what I saw in Florida it seems possible.
Johnston
3/22
How bad were they in Florida?
BurrRutledge
3/22
I don't think you are being ridiculed. Just that your expectations of their (lack of) success in 2014 are widely shared by others, and your turn of phrase was memorable and quotable.
Oleoay
3/22
When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, when the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves, when your womb quickens again, and you bear a living child. Then the Astros will win 70 games, and not before.
smallflowers
3/23
I watched the Houston broadcast of the Astros/Cards game yesterday, and the Houston play-by-play guys said that "St.Louis has a lot of question marks on their pitching staff." The end.
kdierman
3/23
Watched the same game ....if the statement was made it likely was in the context of 5th starter battle and bullpen alignment.

Overall I found the Astros announcers to really have a grasp on MLB overall, and they spent alot of time gushing over Wacha.

With Nolan Ryan back in the fold and all the young talent on the way, gonna take a Long position in the Astros.
oldbopper
3/25
This is coming from a team that is starting Scott Feldman on Opening Day. That is worth a good laugh.
kozysnacker
3/24
"We need order, structure, and sensibleness."

And apparently, the Oxford comma. I'll take the anarchy.
Oleoay
3/24
Refusing to settle for anarchy - order, structure, sensibleness, right?
kmacwade
3/24
excellent community reference :)
Plucky
3/24
Given the 70-win question that prompted all this, in what percentage of sims did they win 70?
lyricalkiller
3/25
70 wins is their mean projection