An Off-Day Check-In on the Brewers' Playoff Odds

As chaotic and often frustrating as the last week has been, the Brewers hung in there, managing a .500 record on a homestand in which they hosted two of the best teams in the American League. As a result, despite the painful and inauspicious loss of Wade Miley, they still have a great shot at reaching the postseason, according to the top two outlets for such numbers, Baseball Prospectus and FanGraphs.

Let's look at BP first. Both sites had the St. Louis Cardinals as favorites in the division when the season began, but as the multifaceted problems facing that organization have manifested themselves, both have backed off. That leaves only one team with an edge on the Crew in the projected standings, using Prospectus's PECOTA projection system. It's the one over whom, for the moment, Milwaukee holds the narrowest of possible leads in the real, current standings.

These curves show the distribution of possible outcomes, as PECOTA sees them, so while the Cubs have a clear edge based on that system's estimates of each team's talent ant depth, there is (obviously) still a great chance for the Brewers to outperform them in the one real eventuality that emerges from this thicket of possible ones.

Numerically, the above translates to a 27.0% chance of the Brewers winning the division. (Chicago is at 42.8%.) They're clear underdogs in that race, but they still have a viable path, and just as importantly, their strong start has given them a leg up on the struggling Diamondbacks, Giants, and Padres, who looked like favorites to claim at least one of the Wild Card berths in the NL (with the loser of the Phillies-Atlanta slugfest out East taking another). PECOTA gives the Crew a 50.7% overall chance to reach October, up from 44.8% one week ago.

That's not bad, but it doesn't match the vibes of this team, which is afire with both talent and intensity, and which owns a record that would extrapolate to 95 or more wins in a full season. FanGraphs better reflects that feeling, even if there's no good way for us to say which system better mirrors the reality of the situation.

The Cubs are the new favorites according to ZiPS (the preferred projection system at FanGraphs), too, but the margins here are much smaller.

Accounting for the margin of error, ZiPS is calling this very much a two-horse race, but a neck-and-neck one, without a clear favorite. Both of the frontrunners have played great baseball lately, and while the Brewers got bad news about Miley and continue to scramble to cover innings, the Cubs have suffered their own injury problems, balancing things out nicely. The biggest news here might be the slow but sure descent of the Cardinals. That, too, matches the way it feels, here outside the computer simulations. The Brewers handled the Cardinals pretty easily even at Busch Stadium. That team doesn't seem to pose much of a threat.

Turning our attention to overall playoff odds, FanGraphs is once again rosier than BP, believing both the Cubs and the Brewers to be robust even compared to the rest of the league.

It's too early to sweat these numbers too much. Because so much can still change in terms of actual roster construction, and because players like Jackson Chourio are still in the process of huge sets of early adjustments, there's lots of uncertainty that systems like these can only loosely inform us about. These data aren't destiny. Still, they're interesting.

Based on this, we can confidently dismiss the notion that the Brewers are just getting lucky, or that they're due to crater at some point in the next month or two. They're a good team, even if some of these same projection systems couldn't quite see that before the year began. We can see, too, that every addition and improvement will be pretty high-leverage, because they live so close to the edge of the flipping coin. A good move or two in July, or the further progress of their bevy of young players, could be the difference between missing the playoffs and making them. Start picking favorite trade targets now.

How well do these numbers match your feelings about the Brewers'  chances? What do you think either system is getting wrong? Weigh in with a comment below.