While we took control of the AL Central yesterday, this does not actually ensure we’re going to the playoffs.
How You Get to the Post Season
The obvious way to get to the post season is … you win. You win the most games. Yay!
This used to be really straightforward. From 1901 to 1968, the league champions (aka pennant winners) were the teams with the best records. Heck, the World Series didn’t happen until 1903!
Then, in 1969, they added in League Championship Series (LCS). The leagues expanded to 12 teams, split the leagues into two Divisions (East and West) of 6 teams each. Cleveland was in the AL East. At this point, the best team in East and West played a best-of-seven series and the winner went to the World Series. This worked well, more or less, but in 1993 the Braves and the Giants both played in the NL West, and the Giants had won one less game, so they didn’t go to the post season.
Fast forward to 1994. A players strike (1981) and two team expansions (1977, 1993) made the leagues bloated and MLB re-aligned and made a third division – Central. But this introduced a new problem! Now you have 3 teams who need to play, so to solve that they introduced the Wild Card. This resolved the issue one year before, as now the second best team in the division runner ups would play.
This change doubled the teams in the post season, and introduced the Division Series (best of five). In 2012, there was a one-game wild-card playoff, where the two teams who didn’t win their divisions went at it. Jump to 202, and we moved to a 10-team post season.
Which means to make the post season you need to:
- Be a division winner
- Be one of the top three teams (besides the winners) in your league
Where We Are Today
History lesson over.
In order to go to the post season, Cleveland must either win the Division or get the 3rd AL Wild Card spot. However, there’s a wrinkle (besides the fact that winning the Division is hard). See, there’s always the possibility two teams have the exact same record. For that, MLB introduced tie-breaker rules, and the first level of which is ‘who won more games against each other).
Cleveland had to sweep the Sox to win the tiebreaker with them. Which did not happen. So the next nine games are critical!
Path A: Winning The Division
To win the Central, we have to win more games than the White Sox. When you look at the schedule, it gets murky.
| Dates | Guardians (78-75) | White Sox (77-75) | Comparison & Outlook |
| Sept 17 – Sept 20 | vs. Athletics (3 Home) | vs. Detroit Tigers (4 Home) | Crucial Home Stretches: Cleveland gets an off day on Sept 17 before a 3-game set with Oakland. Chicago plays 4 at home against Detroit starting Sept 17. |
| Sept 22 – Sept 24 | @ Boston Red Sox (3 Away) | @ KC Royals (3 Away) | Toughest Series: Cleveland faces a premier Wild Card contender on the road at Fenway. Chicago gets a divisional matchup at Kauffman Stadium. |
| Sept 25 – Sept 27 | @ KC Royals (3 Away) | vs. Colorado Rockies (3 Home) | Final Weekend: Cleveland finishes on the road in KC, while Chicago finishes at Rate Field against an NL opponent. |
To guarantee the division, Cleveland needs Chicago to lose enough games so that the White Sox cannot reach or pass Cleveland’s final win total:
- If Cleveland goes 9-0 (87-75): Chicago must go 10-0 to beat them (which gives Chicago 87 wins + tiebreaker). A single White Sox loss gives Cleveland the title.
- If Cleveland goes 7-2 (85-77): Chicago steals the division if they go 9-1 or 8-2. Chicago needs 8-2 to tie at 85-77 and take the tiebreaker.
- If Cleveland goes 5-4 (83-79): Chicago steals the division by going 6-4 or better (reaching 83+ wins).
Now the odds of going 9-0 is just not something to think about. While we might be able to sweep the A’s, Boston would be lucky for us to win the series, and the Royals could go either way.
Path B: Win the Wild Card
Assuming Chicago takes the division, there is only one opportunity left and that’s the third Wild Card slot. There’s no way we can eclipse the Red Sox, so we have to watch out below from the Rangers and the Blue Jays.
| Spot | Team | Record | GB | Playoff Status |
| WC #1 | New York Yankees | 88-63 | — | Clinched Wild Card |
| WC #2 | Boston Red Sox | 82-69 | +4.5 | In position |
| WC #3 | Cleveland Guardians | 78-75 | — | Currently holds 3rd spot |
| In Pursuit | Texas Rangers | 75-76 | 2.5 | 2.5 GB |
| In Pursuit | Toronto Blue Jays | 75-77 | 3.0 | 3.0 GB |
| In Pursuit | Baltimore Orioles | 74-78 | 4.0 | 4.0 GB |
Going 5-4 over the final 9 games gets Cleveland to 83 wins. For Texas (75-76) to surpass 83 wins, they would need to finish 9-2 over their final 11 games. But … that’s actually good!
With Texas and Toronto playing tight schedules, Cleveland only needs to play solid, near-.500 baseball (4-5 or 5-4) over their last 9 to make it nearly mathematically impossible for the chasers to catch up. And honestly, we’re pretty good at that.
Magic Numbers
You may hear about this a lot. For example, the magic number for the wild card spot is 7.
Okay but what does that even fucking mean, right?
A magic number is just the total number of good things that have to happen before a team clinches a playoff spot. Every time your team wins or the team behind you loses, the number drops by 1. When it hits zero, you’re in.
So go back the 7 for the Wild Card. That has a few options in the next games to clinch a berth:
- Cleveland wins 7 out of 9.
- Cleveland wins 6 and the Rangers lose 1.
- Cleveland wins 5 and the Rangers lose 2.
See how it goes?
Now for the Division the magic number is 10 (Chicago has 10 games to play, versus our 9). That’s how tight this is. And worse, because we didn’t sweep yesterday, if we win 5 and Chicago wins 5, then we lose the Division. Basically, we have to win at least 6 games, and Chicago has to lose at least 5 games. Even if we win the next 9, Chicago still has the edge because of the tie-breaker.
Never Tell Me The Odds
The beautiful thing about baseball though is that while the math can look bleak, you simply cannot know the outcomes.
Here are the win-probability graphs for the Sept 15th game, from ESPN and FanGraphs.
In both, you can see Cleveland had the early lead until the 6th, when the White Sox blew it open. But then Cleveland clawed its way back!
Predictive models aren’t perfect. They can’t be. They take the odds and then someone like Brayan Rocchio decides “Naaah, I’mma hit my 7th walk off winner today!” And he did it!
My father, back in 2016, had me look into the whole Hot Hands and streaks math when the Guards went to the playoffs back then.
Winning 7 games straight is an outlier. They won 6 in a row twice, of course the 14 streak, 4 games three times. I’m betting they will lose the next two in Toronto.
[…] what Terry is seeing is momentum, the intangible. You gotta measure the odds with numbers, but making good decisions goes beyond the odds … beyond just the odds. Like CoCo’s diving catch.
Now, the Guards did go to the World Series that year. But, after reading nine papers on hot streaks, I came to the conclusion my gut had always told me: There is no such thing as a winning streak, there is nothing more than standard deviations from the mean. Models of the math have told us that there is only one event in baseball that has happened outside of the frequency of said models. Everything, the longest runs of losses and wins, are exactly as they should be and happen as often as they ought.
What’s the one? Fuckin’ Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio! His 56 game hitting streak back in 1941 makes no mathematical sense. As you can read in Streak of Streaks by Jay Gould, in order to make it mathematically probably to have a run of 50 games with a hit, we should have had four batters with a lifetime average of .400, and 52 with .350 or higher over 1000 games. Instead, three players have achieved a batting average over .350 and not one has managed .400 lifetime.
Most MLB records we consider to be unbreakable are only that way due to changes in the way the game is played. Pitchers no longer play complete games on the regular, nor do they start 60+ games a season. The weirdness of DiMaggio is that his numbers are off the charts for that year, and actually the entirety of MLB history.
Is There Hope?
Well. Maybe?
- Fangraphs thinks Cleveland and Chicago will both get 82-80 for the season which puts us into the Wild Card spot. But they also thing the Rangers will go 81-81, and that would put them above us in the Wild Card!
- Fansided gives Cleveland a 67% chance of making the playoffs, and the Rangers get 40%.
- ESPN gives Cleveland an 82% chance of the playoffs, and the Rangers 37%.
- Rotochamp thinks Cleveland will be 82-80, and the Rangers 85-77.
Note, all data correct as of 5pm ET, September 16th.
And all that kind of means ‘No one fucking knows!’ Mind you, anyone who thinks the Rangers can win the next 10 games (they play tonight) is smoking something.
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