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
| Team | 3 months ago | All-Star Game | Deadline | 2 weeks ago | Today |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
22.6% |
52.4% |
43.5% |
42.9% |
39.1% |