The AL central numbers are interesting--surely Detroit is generally thought to be a much bigger favorite than that.

People bang on the NL Central every year, and the projection has BOTH Wild Card teams coming from it! Go Brewers!

Does this use actual team schedules or generic schedules?

Put your cursor over expected win pct and it says 'exclusive of schedule'.

My condolences to Astros fans. 0.0%, ouch.

As a Royals fan I hate this product.

There is a bug in your NL west projections.

If I'm reading this right Toronto das a 5% chance of winning their division. If any of you want to give 19 to 1 you have my contact information on file.

This product not working. Yankees lose to Rays and 1 day s
Delta goes up?

As of right now, it looks like it's assuming one wild-card team in each league. Is that a bug, or a feature?

Also, the Reds' .000 expected winning percentage seems a tad pessimistic.

How is that every team's playoff odds have increased in the past 7 days? That cannot be possible.

Will a non pecota version of this come out this season?

These projections sure dampen the excitement of being a Nats fan. However, a 19% chance of getting to the playoffs is certainly better than their chances any previous year since 2005.

if the Angels win .541 of their remaining games, as projected, that will net them another 78. Added to the 6 wins they have so far that adds up to 84, not 89. Why isn't their projected record 84-78?

And, while we're at it, how can a win by the Red Sox last night reduce their playoff odds by 0.7 percentage points, while a loss by the Jays increases their odds by 0.3 (to 4.6%, so the increment is meaningful)?

Even if it is the expected win percentage used to run the monte carlo simulation and not an actual winning percentage it still seems like a stretch to expect the Angels to win 58% of their games for the next five months, or, for that matter, to gain ground on the Rangers given that the Rangers expected winning pecentage in signficantly higher than that of the Angels.

Angels are currently nine games behind Texas. The sim says that they will finish the season six games behind Texas, even though the input to the sim says the Rangers are the better team. I think we need some clarification from someone at BP that this thing is actually working properly.

If you look at any of the teams that have had an extreme good or bad start, and try to reconcile their final result, it doesn't add up. It's almost as if the sim is ignoring the games already played, and simming the entire season. Look at Washington, San Diego, and the Angels for example. I think some clarification by someone at BP would be helpful.

This needs to be explained better; either it's wrong or extremely counterintuitive. Tampa Bay takes 2 of 3 @ Texas, 1 @ Ana, and the 1st 3 @ home against Seattle...but their 7-Day Delta is -5.9%.

VERY difficult to see how this is an improvement over the old Playoff Odds; I liked seeing the season long list, the game by game increments...

This product is clearly broken. The Nationals have dropped from about a 9% playoff percentage to a 2.7% playoff percentage by taking two of three from the Diamondbacks and winning the first game of the series against the division rival Phillies.

And the Marlins now have a 100% chance of winning the NL East! Somebody needs to pay attention and fix this thing.

The silence from BP is deafening, so let's try this one more time, using Boston as an example.

Boston Red Sox:

"Expected Win Pct" = .534. My understanding is that this is the input to the sim. i.e. this is the chance of Boston winning a game at a neutral site vs. a .500 team. If that assumption is wrong, then obviously the rest of this argument will not make any sense.

"Sim Win" = 86.7, which equals a .535 win percentage. So, at the start of the year, this would be a very sensible result, just a tiny variation from .534 due to luck, and/or strength of schedule.

The problem is, that the Red Sox sit at 12 wins and 19 losses today. So, to get to 86.7 wins, they must win 74.7 of their remaining 131 games, which is a .570 clip. Seems like a long way off from the expected .534, more than we can reasonably explain by luck and schedule.

Repeat this exercise for any team that has started with an unusually high or low win percentage and you will see the same effect.

THE GAMES ALREADY PLAYED ARE BEING IGNORED.

If I seem upset by this, it's because the Playoff Odds Report is a wonderful idea in theory, and I was looking forward to tracking it every day. For baseball nerds like me, it's an extremely interesting way to watch the season unfold. But the execution has fallen far short of my hopes.

Guys at Baseball Prospectus, if you are listening, please give a reply, even if it's to say that I'm completely wrong. Thank you.

This morning the playoff odds all said 0.0%, and then orioles playoff odds shot up to 24% today, so I am assuming it's now working correctly or more closely to correctly.

Also, Id like to propose an improvement for next year: A graph of the different team's playoff odds thru the season would be very itneresting.

Yesterday's report was very encouraging, but today kind of feels like the movie Groundhog Day.

yep, its still screwed up.

also you relied on these clearly incorrect statistics in today's article about the orioles

Now that this is working, it's interesting to see just how much impact one game can have on a team's playoff chances. Intuitively I never would have expected one day swings of 7 and 8 percent. Very cool.

orioles went from 24% to 28% but it only shows a 1.6% 1 day delta. still something wrong.

All the numbers are same as yesterday.

and again today. Your code clearly isnt updating when a new game is played.

Better if they were still the same, maybe. Rays win, go down 3.9% for playoffs. Cleveland beats Detroit, and their chance of getting in the playoffs declines non-trivially.

This is not plausible. (This could happen if a serious injury occurred and that was factored in, but that isn't what happened.) Prior years did not have these implausible results.

The alternative explanation, that the change to WC's changes the odds in very weird ways, doesn't appear to be correct. (The second alternative explanation, that the new way is right and the old way was wrong, is facially implausible because it is mistaken, I think.)

The playoff odds do not appear to be value added and should be scrubbed pending a fix or a convincing explanation.

Here's a delta comparison from May 24 to May 25. I have only listed the teams that played a game on May 24.
For each team, I show Win or Loss, then playoff odds from May 24 and May 25. Then I show my calculated delta followed by the delta from the report. All of the deltas are incorrect except for San Fran.

Cle W 64.6 65.7 1.1 4.3
Chi W 27.2 29.1 1.9 -0.8
LAA W 39.0 44.1 5.1 4.7
Det L 45.3 40.6 -4.7 -3.5
Min L 0.4 0.0 -0.4 0.0
Sea L 0.4 0.8 0.4 0.0

Cin W 64.2 68.1 3.9 5.5
SD W 0.0 0.0 0.0 -0.8
SF W 37.0 39.4 2.4 2.4
Phi W 26.0 38.2 12.2 9.4
Atl L 81.5 78.7 -2.8 -0.8
NYM L 9.8 5.5 -4.3 -2.8
Mia L 50.4 37.0 -13.4 -11.4
StL L 86.6 87.0 0.4 -4.7