Nothing is guaranteed in October

In a little over a month, the relative meritocracy of the regular season will give way to what is often considered (or derided) rubbish. Baseball – a game determined by daily play and often won by the team with the better contingency plan – is ultimately decided in a small sample of one month.

Everything, as they say, can happen in October. Nothing is guaranteed.

Except maybe the Atlanta Braves.

If you’ve read anything about the Los Angeles Angels — or the Mets, or the Padres — this season, you’ve probably seen mentions of FanGraphs playoff odds. As teams hoping or expecting to make the postseason took stock of an increasingly disappointing season and weighed up what to do next, we regularly turned to that algorithm for a cold, hard reality check.

But now we’re so close to the 162-race finish line that the standings themselves may be the better barometer of how the race into October is going. So instead I invite you – after clicking back to FanGraphs – to turn your attention a little more to the far right column, where you can find each team’s odds of winning the World Series.

With more than a dozen teams still in the running and only 100 percentage points to go (even without factoring in the unpredictability of the postseason), each team’s odds are necessarily pretty low. The Baltimore Orioles, on course for 101 wins, have only a 4.1% chance of winning the World Series. The Tampa Bay Rays, despite being a game behind in the division and thus currently battling to get the bye, have better odds as they are projected to be more talented overall. Yet they only amount to 8.9%. Reigning champion Houston Astros are the only American League team to win the World Series in double digits, at 13.4%.

In the National League, two teams have odds over 10%: the Los Angeles Dodgers—the best team in baseball by far over the past decade—defying preseason predictions to take a comfortable lead in a division that initially looked looked for the taking – and the Braves.

The Dodgers currently have a 14.5% chance of winning the World Series; their opponents in this weekend’s star-studded matchup have a 28%(!) chance. Currently, 17 of MLB’s 30 teams have a postseason berth or are out of the picture for five games or less. Nevertheless, the Braves have a more than one in four chance of hoisting a trophy on the other side of what is basically a pretty random gauntlet.

(And it has been for a long time! I’ve been baffled by this fact since the first time end of July.)

The Braves’ odds are definitely about how dominant they are — and we’ll get to that. But this also reflects stratification in NL compared to relative parity in AL. And by “stratification” I really mean that the NL wildcard field is just not very good.

According to a September 1 record, the Braves are the top baseball team, while the Dodgers and Orioles are tied for second place. But aside from the infamy of the Central Division, the contending teams in the American League are more competitive. The three teams currently holding AL wild card spots have a combined winning percentage of .582 (94 winning pace), while the three NL wild card teams have a winning percentage of .537 (87 winning pace). The top NL wild card team – the Philadelphia Phillies – would not qualify for a wild card in the AL in its current form. And since the top seed in each league faces the winner of the top two wild card teams, the Braves have an easier path, at least to the championship series, than the AL’s top seed.

The Braves are so good that ESPN got some rival executives to weigh in on how unbeatable the team seems to be. A GM in their division called them the best in baseball — “and it’s not even close.”

That story details all the ways the Braves are superlative, right down to the slash against different types of pitches. But here’s a fun way to conceptualize how good the lineup is: Even in an era of less juicy baseballs, the Braves are poised to surpass the 2019 Twins’ Bombas Squad for most home runs hit by a team in 2019. hit a season. And while that Twins team was obviously pretty good on offense, they were second in batting average, sixth in on-base percentage, third in overall wRC+, and last in stolen bases. The Braves are first in batting average, first in on-base percentage, first in wRC+ and (womp womp) are sixth in stolen bases.

The Braves’ pitching staff as a whole has the lowest ERA in the NL and the highest K/9 in baseball. It has a few holes more than the lineup, but is poised to excel in the postseason when teams tend to lean heavily on their top starters. Spencer Strider is second among all pitchers in fWAR and first in strikeouts, with such a big lead that the difference between him and Kevin Gausman in second place is the same as the difference between Gausman and the pitcher with the 22nd most strikeouts.

Behind Strider, the Braves have Max Fried, who missed most of the season due to a forearm strain but has been good enough since his return to have the seventh-best park-adjusted ERA among starters by at least 50 innings.

The Atlanta bullpen has the lowest ERA, lowest WHIP, and highest K rate in NL. In short: there’s nothing the Braves aren’t good at.

Still, an almost 30% chance of winning the World Series is pretty nonsensical if you take the numbers too literally. By the time we get to the point where they really matter, they will be zero or close to 50%. Still, World Series odds point in direction and in terms of magnitude.

FanGraphs has been tracking postseason odds since 2014. In the past nine years, the eventual World Series winner has had the highest World Series odds on September 1 three times (including in 2020). So maybe it’s a bridge too far to ‘guarantee’ something. However, there is only one time a team has had higher World Series odds at this point in the season, and that was the 2019 Houston Astros, who went all the way to Game 7 before being defeated by the Washington Nationals (6.1% chances on September 1). that year).

So what are this year’s World Series odds telling us? That the Braves are dominant at an almost unprecedented level, that they will probably play until the end of October – and that there is still plenty of room to be surprised by another team.