Are low playoff odds really a sign of doom halfway through the year?

Low odds are low odds, after all

At one point in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, hobbits Merry and Pippin are trying to get the Ents to help them out, but (among other things) they are struggling with communication. The Ent they befriended, Treebeard, tells them that “it takes a long time to say anything” in their language, and so they “never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say.”

I think of this quote a lot at about this time in the Major League Baseball season. In a few days, we will reach the mathematical halfway point in the year. Every team in the league will have played 81 games, which is just objectively a huge number of games, and yet that’s still halfway through the whole season. While each individual game may be its own piece of drama and entertainment and athletic spectacle, it takes a lot of time to find out anything in baseball. Baseball is the Old Entish of sports, in other words.

In the first half or so of the year, the Kansas City Royals have been bad. This isn’t unfair or a biased take—they have a losing record and their run differential is negative. The Royals have clearly been a bad team. They haven’t been a terrible team. But they have been bad. And yet, there is still some uncertainty. A lot, after, all, can happen in 81 games.

There is a limit to what can happen in 81 games. Half of the season does tell you something about the team, and what it has said is that the Royals are unlikely to make the playoffs with their current collection of talent. Fangraphs has been using projection systems to calculate live playoff odds since 2014, and at the moment the Royals stand at a cool 14.4%.

Now, I don’t have a degree in math, but 14.4% is not 0%. If we simulated the season a thousand times, they would make the playoffs 144 of those times. Unfortunately, the laws of physics and/or our current level of science means that we can’t actually simulate it (though I would like them to shoot a couple of baseballs at each other in the Large Hadron Collider just to see what happens). Fortunately, we can brute force it and look at a bunch of playoff teams and where they stood at this point in the year.

I had to pick a date, so I went with July 6. Yeah, it’s kkind of arbitrary, but it’s the point when the Royals finish their midyear gauntlet against above average teams, and historically it pretty much means that every team throughout the sample size will have played at least half of its games by that point.

Since 2014, 53 teams have made the playoffs. Five of them had playoff odds below 15% on that date. Those teams and their playoff odds on July 6 were:

• 2018 Colorado Rockies (9.6%)
• 2018 Oakland Athletics (9.2%)
• 2015 Texas Rangers (7.7%)
• 2024 Detroit Tigers (3.6%)
• 2019 St. Louis Cardinals (3.1%)

Interestingly, at this point in the year, those odds are pretty accurate. You would expect 15% of playoff teams to have had a 15% chance at making the playoffs there, and the real figure at 9.4% is pretty dang close—especially considering that some of those teams with low playoff odds would have self-selected out of the race by selling at the deadline.

But the problem with really low playoff odds at this point in the year is that teams have to do some really crazy shit in the second half to make the playoffs. Last year’s Tigers won 31 of their last 44 games and needed the Twins to simultaneously lose 24 of their last 33 games. The 2015 Rangers went a colossal 45-25 from July 21 on. And going back a little further than Fangraphs’s odds—the 2007 Rockies were one game below .500 as late as July 16 and it took them winning 14 of their last 15 games to get into the playoffs.

To me, the biggest question is not if the Royals can make the playoffs with a low chance at doing so around Independence Day; plenty of teams have accomplished that feat. Rather, the bigger deal is if it’s worth punting on the season by selling at the deadline versus standing pat or even pushing your chips in to try and jumpstart those odds with a new shiny outfielder (or two (or three)).

While I don’t have an answer for you, I think the Royals could hedge a little and get value from trading, say, Seth Lugo while not quite turning to a fire sale and completely incinerating the rest of the season. That’s functionally what Detroit did last year. Regardless, we’ll just have to wait a few weeks for the picture to get clearer. The Royals could get hot. They could stay cold. Both matter significantly to the approach at the trade deadline.