Crude Playoff Odds--2017

These are very simple playoff odds, based on my crude rating system for teams using an equal mix of W%, EW% (based on R/RA), PW% (based on RC/RCA), and 69 games of .500. They account for home field advantage by assuming a .500 team wins 54.2% of home games (major league average 2006-2015). They assume that a team's inherent strength is constant from game-to-game. They do not generally account for any number of factors that you would actually want to account for if you were serious about this, including but not limited to injuries, the current construction of the team rather than the aggregate seasonal performance, pitching rotations, estimated true talent of the players, etc.

The CTRs that are fed in are:



Notable here is that three AL teams rank ahead of the Dodgers, which includes New York rather than Boston. NYA’s raw EW% and PW% are very close to LA, and LA played the second-weakest schedule in MLB while the Red Sox and Yankees played the toughest schedules of any playoff teams.

Wilcard game odds (the least useful since the pitching matchups aren’t taken into account, and that matters most when there is just one game):



LDS:



I think most people would pick WAS/CHN as the most compelling on paper, which is backed up by the odds. Unfortunately for me, CLE/NYA would be a sneaky-good series.

LCS:



World Series:



Because I set this spreadsheet up when home field advantage went to a particular league (as it has been for the entire history of the World Series prior to this year), all of the NL teams are listed as the home team. But the probabilities all consider which team would actually have the home field advantage in each matchup.

Put it all together:



This one should make it clear why I don’t have much to say this year.