Tell Me There’s A Chance: World Series Odds Need To Be Fixed

Being a sports fan is hard. On average, a major league team’s chance to win the World Series in a given year is 3.3 percent. I promise the math works out. Some teams, particularly larger-market teams, may have a greater chance, but for fans of any team you are more likely to end the season sad than happy. However, in April there is hope for every team. This is an old baseball cliché, but it is also generally true!

If you look at FanGraphs’ playoff odds, every team has a chance to make it at least to the wild-card game. Even the Phillies! So the cliché is grounded in a bit of reality, as clichés usually are. On the other hand, two teams are listed as having 0.0 percent chance of winning the World Series. Those darn Phillies and the Atlanta Braves.

Let’s talk about those Braves and their chances at fortune. For purposes of this exercise, we are going to assume that the playoff odds are correct up until the playoffs actually occur. Maybe you think the Braves 3.2 percent chance of making the playoffs is pessimistic. After starting 3-0, it has jumped from 3.1 percent, so that’s something! Maybe you think that is too low (or too high), but that doesn’t matter, this exercise could be done using many bad teams. The Braves have a 3.2 percent chance of making the playoffs but a 0.0 percent chance of winning the World Series. This is very unlikely to be true.

I don’t have the statistical skills to delve into the projection models, but I believe there is a fundamental flaw that essentially double dips on poorly projected teams. The playoff odds beyond simply making the playoffs are calculated assuming each team is as good or as bad as projected. The problem with this method is that it doesn’t comport with reality. If the Braves (or the Phillies, Diamondbacks, Rockies, Brewers, Twins or Rangers) make the playoffs, it will be at least partially due to them being a much better team than the projections thought they were. Of course, the projections know that this is possible, hence the slim odds instead of no odds of making the playoffs.

For purposes of this chart, I’m going to make generous assumptions on the decimal points that we cannot see. These assumptions work against my conclusion and I believe my conclusion still holds. For percentages that are listed as 0.0, I’m going to assume 0.05. * For 0.1, I’m going to assume 0.15. And so on. These odds all come from FanGraphs projections as of Friday, April 10, 2015.

Below is a list of teams with less than a 10-percent chance of making the playoffs. Assuming they make the playoffs, based on these conservative assumptions, the odds of these teams winning the World Series are:

Team                         1 in…

Phillies                      24

Rangers                     16

Twins                         16

Diamondbacks         19

Braves                     64

White Sox                  18

Reds                            30

Brewers                      36

Rockies                       39

The three teams in the AL actually don’t look that bad. I’d say they are perhaps a little too pessimistic, but not drastically so. In the NL, the Braves are the worst example, but the Reds, Brewers, and Rockies are all clearly unrealistic considering what we know about the playoffs (that it is something, perhaps a big something, of a crapshoot). My guess is that this could be fixed by regressing the odds of each team heavily towards a typical playoff team to account for the fact that poorly projected teams that make the playoffs are likely way towards the top end of their possible outcomes. If the Braves make the playoffs, it will be largely because they are good, and probably also because they got a decent amount of luck. I’m not saying they’d be 8-1 (as a division winner) or 16-1 (as a wild card team), which is what their odds would be based on coin flips. But there is no way the Imaginary Good Braves would go into the playoffs as 64-1 longshots to win the World Series. You don’t need a calculator or anything other than common sense to know this. And remember, I used very conservative assumptions. It is likely that if I had access to more significant digits, some of these numbers would look much worse.

 

*The Phillies listed odds of making the NLCS are 0.0 percent. Based on this, I halved the odds for winning the NLCS and then halved them again for winning the World Series. Thus, I conservatively estimated that the FanGraphs odds for the Phillies winning the World Series are 0.0125 percent. Thanks again, Phillies, for making things harder.