If you draw the line at one-in-one-thousand, we’re up to three teams who’ve been eliminated from playoff consideration in Major League Baseball, going by FanGraphs’s playoff odds. We mentioned a few weeks ago that the Orioles and Rockies had already achieved this status, partially thanks to the strength of their individual divisions. Well, now we can add the Tigers to the list. At 9-23, nine games back of their division lead and eight and a half back of the second wild card spot, we can confidently say that the Detroit Tigers will not make the playoffs this year.
This leaves 27 teams in contention—a number that should drop significantly in the weeks to come. The way the landscape looks right now, no teams are between 3.0% and 13.0%, but five uneliminated teams are at or below 3.0%: the Pirates (0.4%), the Marlins (0.7%), the Rangers (0.9%), the Mariners (1.8%), and the Diamondbacks (3.0%). Of those, the Marlins played in the division series last year and the Mariners have a winning record, and I don’t know if this says anything at all about anything at all but I think it might be an interesting look at how good an understanding we have of teams’ strength as fans right now, for better or for worse.
