This morning, before the Reds took the field, we did a quick set of Monte Carlo simulations to see where the playoff cut lines in each league are likeliest to fall. What does this mean? Using the average single-game win probability, per FanGraphs, of every contending team over the rest of the season, having adjusted head-to-head games to be 50/50 propositions, we simulated the remaining games of this MLB season one thousand times, then checked how often each win total was enough to take the 6-seed in both the AL and the NL. Here’s what we found.
In the American League:
| 6th Place Wins | Frequency |
| 86 | 1.5% |
| 87 | 7.6% |
| 88 | 30.3% |
| 89 | 41.7% |
| 90 | 16.5% |
| 91 | 2.3% |
| 92 | 0.1% |
In the AL, there’s an 81% chance 90 wins will get teams into the playoffs without even having to worry about tiebreakers. Thanks to the Mariners–Rangers inverse correlation we’ll discuss next, there’s a 100% chance 91 wins will get teams in. For the Blue Jays and Astros, then, each of whom aren’t in a great spot with those tiebreakers, winning seven more games will almost definitely be enough, while there’s a 40% chance winning five more will still leave them clear of 6th place. Since 6th place isn’t necessarily going to be a tie, 89 is the likeliest necessary win total. In other words? Winning 89 games should be enough, but 90 would be safer, and 91 is guaranteed to earn playoff admission.
The Mariners and Rangers’ situation is different because they play one another seven more times, turning their respective remaining schedules into more of a play-in series than a race against the field. The Rangers do lead the season series 5–1 so far, so they’ll likely hold the tiebreaker if it matters, making 88 a more viable number for them than it is for anyone else. Again, though, 89 is probably the necessary number. The only thing that’s different for these two is that 90 is an even safer place than it is for Houston and Toronto.
In the National League:
| 6th Place Wins | Frequency |
| 82 | 0.6% |
| 83 | 5.8% |
| 84 | 25.7% |
| 85 | 38.6% |
| 86 | 23.7% |
| 87 | 5.2% |
| 88 | 0.3% |
| 89 | 0.1% |
The National League is much more convoluted, because there are five teams involved instead of four and there’s little head-to-head remaining between them, meaning it’s possible all five could do something like win eight more games the rest of the way. For teams feeling good about their tiebreaker chances, 85 wins should be enough. For teams feeling bad, 86 is the likely number. Bump those each up by one or two to find the threshold where teams start feeling safe.
What does this all, combined, make the goal for each team the rest of the way? Let’s put it in words, aiming for safe numbers but not worrying about the unrealistic and not accounting for results so far today:
- Toronto: Go 6–5 from here.
- Houston: Go 6–5 from here.
- Texas: Go 4–3 against Seattle, win at least one in the other four games.
- Seattle: Go 4–3 against Texas, win at least two in the other four games.
- Diamondbacks: Go 7–3 from here.
- Cubs: Go 8–3 from here.
- Marlins: Go 7–3 from here.
- Reds: Go 8–1 from here.
- Giants: Go 10–1 from here.
Again, that’s to reach a high level of safety, and that’s entering today (Update: The Reds losing that game is very, very bad for the Reds). But it does point to how different the situations are in the two leagues. In the AL, three of the four teams are going to make the field, and that inverse correlation between Texas’s remaining wins and Seattle’s remaining wins means .500 baseball is probably enough to make the cut. In the NL, three of the five are going to miss it, and the tiebreakers are uncertain, and it’s pretty likely that at least two of the five teams in the mix are going to have a great week and a half, making a great week and a half potentially the necessary thing to do. The leverage of each individual game in the National League race right now is comparable to the leverage of individual playoff games. Everyone needs to win.
The Cubs Broke Through
Did I tell you the Cubs would be fine? Yes. Was I sure of that? No. Did I really even say it? We’ll let history be the judge. Regardless, the Cubs got a big win yesterday, and while the Diamondbacks continue to play out of their minds, the Giants are down to one intentional starting pitcher after Alex Cobb’s premeditated hip injury, so this might be a four-team race by the end of the week. Someone might finally bow out.
This is the second time this year that the Cubs have needed to win a higher percentage of games than just that necessary to win series. The first time was in July, of course, when they surged back into contention after appearing headed for a depressing sell-off. They pulled it off back then. Will they answer the bell again here?
The truth is that whether they do or don’t has just as much to do with how the Pirates, Rockies, Braves, and Brewers play in their respective games as how the Cubs play from the opposite dugout. There’s also luck involved—the normal baseball luck, for one thing, but also the luck of which other teams in the Wild Card chase do what. Do the Diamondbacks stay hot? Do the Marlins get hot again? Do the Reds fall off? Do the Giants rally to make this interesting? The Cubs control their fate, but they only control it so much.
Last night’s hit parade is encouraging, but it’s only one night, and the wind blowing out helped, especially in the early innings. Really, the most credit for the win might belong to Javier Assad, who wasn’t his best but made the pitches when he had to and kept the baseball mostly in the yard. No one from the bullpen threw more than 21 pitches, and only Luke Little threw more than 15, so the corps should be fresh tonight. Hopefully both offenses’ performances last night are indicative of a broader trend.
Shohei Ohtani Is a Better Hitter Than Pitcher
Shohei Ohtani had his arm surgery, and while it wasn’t exactly Tommy John, it’s forecast to have a similar effect. His agent shared an expectation that Ohtani will be ready to hit by Opening Day 2024 and will be ready to pitch again come 2025. That’s probably optimistic, if anything, coming from Ohtani’s agent, but that’s what we have. Ohtani will be available to hit next season and to throw baseballs the year after, if all goes as his agent hopes.
Ohtani is a very good pitcher. Last year, he amassed the sixth-most pitcher fWAR in the majors, and while that accounted for nearly half his career total, the strikeouts have always been high and the performance has never been worse, by xERA or FIP, than 4.00 over a single season, a number where you’d expect the pitcher to allow four earned runs per nine innings, or two or three runs in an average start. On his career, Ohtani has a 3.31 FIP. This year, that would be better than all but eleven of the 161 pitchers with the most innings in the game. (We chose the threshold which gave us 161 because that’s close to how many pitchers are in all rotations combined at any one time.) In other words? Ohtani might not be the best pitcher in the game, but he’s still solid as a traditional ace, and were he a team’s second starter, he’d likely be the best in that role in the whole sport.
The thing about Ohtani’s pitching, though, is that his hitting is even better. Last year was unusual in this respect, but in every other season—including or excluding those when he was recovering from his previous Tommy John surgery—he’s been at least 60% more valuable from the plate than he’s been on the mound. Over these last three seasons, in which he’s mostly been healthy, he’s been 30% more valuable from the plate.
It’s hard to understand just how good Ohtani is. It’s something where the numbers do speak, but it’s hard to contextualize what they say. What we’re saying here is that Shohei Ohtani is as good on the mound as a guy like Tim Hudson or Andy Pettite was on those A’s and Yankees teams around 2001. At the plate? He’s a third more valuable. You’ve got Tim Hudson and peak Roberto Alomar in one person. The market rate for even just the hitter part of that combination is, for next season, around forty million dollars.
The Promotion–Relegation Idea
There’s a Yahoo piece going around which reports that a system of promotion and relegation between a Pac-X and a Mountain West is something Oregon State, Washington State, and the current Mountain West members are considering:
“Everything is on the table,” said one high-placed source with knowledge of discussions between the leagues. “We’re looking at a lot of options. This one included.”
It is entirely unclear what in the article is a report, what is speculation, and what is the writer—Ross Dellenger—proposing ideas of his own. With this in mind, I’d caution you to not take the proposal seriously at all. My impression, reading the article four or five times, is that the Mountain West and the Pac-2 are considering various ideas, and some idea involving some sort of promotion and relegation is among them, and that the specific structure Dellenger outlines—with named expansion targets and a flexible schedule and a promotion game and a relegation game—is just an idea, not necessarily one these schools are looking at, and is possibly one Dellenger came up with himself. I wish he or his editors had made it more clear what is being discussed by the schools and what is just him brainstorming, because while there is nothing at all wrong with brainstorming (believe me, I love drawing up ideas for promotion and relegation systems in American sports), this feels intentionally misleading.
For those reasons, I don’t have much to say about the specifics of the proposal. Focusing on its specifics loses the forest for the trees. The more important thing is whether the Pac-2 and Mountain West will do this, and whether they should.
It’s hard to believe the college football industry would let a Pac-X and a Mountain West exist separately but be run as one conference. It’s hard to believe they would be allowed to have two separate nationally accepted conference champions. It’s also unlikely the Pac-X would still be viewed as a power conference in any meaningful way, retaining only two previous power conference members. At best, this Pac-X (I’m using ‘X’ to avoid specifying a number of teams) would be viewed somewhere between the Big 12/ACC tier and the AAC tier of FBS football, with the new Mountain West now closer to the MAC and to Conference USA than to the aforementioned AAC. Even if all the best mid-majors in the country were to come together right now and form their own conference with Oregon State and Washington State, I doubt it would be viewed by the industry in the same light as a power conference. It would deserve to be, but it wouldn’t be. Unfortunately, that’s not how conferences are evaluated.
Instead, conferences are evaluated by the height of their ceiling and the depth of their upper echelons. How many football teams do you send to the Playoff? How many basketball teams do you send to the NCAA Tournament? How many teams do you have ranked in the top 25? These are things which correlate to conference strength, but they’re a very poor evaluator of the actual strength of a conference. It’s a little like relying only on batting average in baseball. It’s not an awful indicator, but it misses a lot of things.
Where this is really bad for this proposed idea is that a dual-conference in which the best X teams have to play one another and play the worst X teams sparingly is one poorly conducive to putting teams in the College Football Playoff. Who makes the Playoff? The teams who don’t lose. Who doesn’t lose? The teams with the easier schedules. This is an oversimplification—you have to play some sort of competition to earn the committee’s nod—but there’s a reason the Big Ten East has so reliably put teams in the playoff mix in recent years, and that reason is that Big Ten East schools have only had to play two teams a year among the nation’s twenty best. Anything beyond that for Michigan and Ohio State is unlucky or voluntary. Good teams cannibalizing one another is a real concern, and the Pac-12 is poised to demonstrate that over these next two and a half months.
Overall, then, no, this is not going to happen, nor should it. The individual stakeholders here are incentivized not to find the best upside, but to avoid being viewed as responsible for disaster, and with it easy for players to transfer, with it hard for administrators to account for millions of dollars of revenue uncertainty in a university budget, and with a short-term-obsessed media always in competition with itself to produce the most outlandish proclamation of doom, at least some of the individuals making these decisions would guarantee themselves a date with public shaming by agreeing to such a thing.
What should the Mountain West and Pac-2 really do? They should form one league and set their schedule every offseason, with nothing guaranteed before the transfer portal is mostly settled. They should build that shcedule in a way which maximizes their chance of a zero or one-loss champion: If you have three teams who could be of top 25 quality, only let two of them play in the regular season, and maybe give the fourth-best team the easiest schedule in the league to try to game your way to an extra ranked team. It’s stupid; it’s so stupid; it’s anti-competitive; but it’s what college football, as an industry—one heavily driven by its media—incentivizes.
One last thing here: I love the way promotion and relegation work in soccer overseas, but I find Americans who like the idea sometimes don’t understand just how cool it is. Yes, it’s fun to have consequences for winning and losing, and it’s fun to have games reach such high levels of pressure, deciding the athletic and financial future of an entire sporting community. Those things are great. But they’re only half of what’s great about it.
The other half—the thing which makes it all work—is that relegation goes all the way to the bottom, and promotion goes all the way to the top. By some accounts, there are twenty levels to the pyramid in English soccer, ranging from the purely amateur to one of the most moneyed leagues in the world. Win enough, and teams rise. Lose enough, and teams fall. The college football equivalent would be to take the FBS, the FCS, Division II, and Division III and break them up into a combined eleven levels, then create paths below the bottom for NAIA schools and junior colleges to reach Division III. What’s described in the Yahoo piece is a marketing gimmick, and it would certainly draw eyeballs, but it is a minuscule imitation of the thing it emulates, like a 3D-printed Christmas ornament of the Mona Lisa.
How Bad Is the Packers’ O-Line Situation?
There are two ways to look at the Packers’ offensive line situation. The first is that its best two linemen are hurt badly enough that they weren’t on the field in the second half on Sunday because of injuries. The second is that one of its best two linemen is hurt, and the other is in a perpetual state of load management due to an injury from which he will never fully recover.
The turf messes with this.
It would objectively be a better situation if David Bakhtiari didn’t play because he doesn’t want to play on turf. That would imply Bakhtiari’s healthy enough to play and doesn’t want to risk more injuries. It would objectively be worse if Bakhtiari was really too hurt to play, as Matt LaFleur has been saying. There’s a paradox here where LaFleur doesn’t want to stir up turf drama but by avoiding that, he’s possibly making Bakhtiari out to be more injured than he is.
I don’t know what to think about the turf thing. I’m curious if it’s different for linemen than it is for players at skill positions, or if contact and non-contact injuries are affected by the same factors of stability and give. I’m also a little annoyed that it’s Bakhtiari, specifically, who’s complaining so much about the turf, because Bakhtiari can be a diva—which should be a wild thing to say about an offensive lineman in Green Bay, by the way—and that makes this theorized refusal to play on turf come across differently than it would if a different lineman with a chronic injury was talking about wanting to avoid games on turf out of a desire to be there for his quarterback and the run game for as much of the season as possible. It’s twisted the narrative so far that when Elgton Jenkins pointed at the turf as a cause for his own injury, my instinctive internal reaction was, “Did Bakhtiari tell you that?”
Overall, the best thing is everybody healthy and no turf drama. So, hopefully Bakhtiari’s back out there on Sunday, doing his thing as one of the best tackles in the game, and hopefully Jenkins gets healthy soon, and thank goodness there isn’t another week of turf until Week 12, so we don’t have to think about that piece again until a Thanksgiving game against the division favorites with three more turf games on the horizon down the closing stretch. That storyline’s going to stink. Four of the last seven games are going to involve a turf storyline. At least we won’t have to talk about it for nine more weeks.
