The 2025 Playoff Odds Are Here!
Which teams will still be playing come October? Our playoff odds offer one answer.
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The playoff odds and projected standings for the 2025 season are now available!
As a refresher, to generate our playoff odds, we take each team’s projected performance and the schedule, and use those inputs to simulate the remaining season 20,000 times. We aggregate these outcomes to find the probability of a team winning its division or a Wild Card spot, along with its chances of winning the World Series and various playoff rounds. If a team has a 90% chance of making the playoffs, it means that 18,000 out of the 20,000 simulated seasons end with the team playing in October.
To calculate each team’s initial projected performance, we use individual player projections from the FanGraphs Depth Charts, which are a 50/50 blend of ZiPS and Steamer, prorated to our RosterResource Depth Chart playing time. We then aggregate those individual player projections by team and apply the BaseRuns calculation to each team’s batters and pitchers to get projected runs scored and allowed. Those BaseRuns runs scored and allowed calculations are used to calculate a projected winning percentage using the Pythagorean win expectancy. This is the number you’ll see on our projected standings page, which amounts to a team’s projected winning percentage versus neutral opposition. Here I’ll remind everyone that this is calculated before being run through the season simulation 20,000 times, so the projected standings can, and often do, differ from what you’ll see on the playoff odds page.
New this season, both by popular demand and as a matter of curiosity, we’ve added a version of the playoff odds that use the FanGraphs Depth Chart projections to calculate those initial team projections using WAR. Please note the existing BaseRuns version will continue to be our “official” version for the time being. Instead of running player performance through BaseRuns and calculating winning percentage using Pythagorean win expectancy, we add a replacement level to team WAR as calculated by our Depth Charts. For instance, our projections have the Dodgers forecast for 55.9 WAR. We add in a replacement-level team’s wins (for this projection set, that’s about 40 wins) and the Dodgers end up with a projected winning percentage of .595.
You’ll notice that the .595 winning percentage using the WAR calculation is pretty similar to the .599 Dodgers winning percentage we forecast using the BaseRuns calculation. Both methods produce similar results, though there can be significant differences depending on the team. Here’s a chart showing the correlation in 2024 and 2025. I’ve included the FanGraphs Depth Charts, ATC, THE BAT, and OOPSY projection systems as data points:
Since we only have this data archived for the past year, it’s not yet clear if there’s an advantage to using WAR for the initial projections instead of BaseRuns. The difference between the two is also not easily explained. These are two completely separate calculations. WAR includes numerous additional data points that the BaseRuns framework does not, such as park adjustments, league adjustments, fielding, catcher framing, context neutral linear weights, and FIP for pitcher calculations, just to name a few. But BaseRuns continues to be an accurate run estimator based on standard counting stats.
BaseRuns has a slightly higher correlation with team wins since 2002 than WAR does (.83 to .81 r-squared). This appears to be a slight advantage for BaseRuns, but it’s not a huge one, and they clearly both work pretty well. We’ll continue to monitor whether one or the other work betters for projections.
