Everyone in the Pool!

The baseball team representing my alma mater plays about 40 games in a full season. With 40 games left in the MLB season, it seems pretty clear that the Kansas City Royals will play October baseball, and not the play-in variety. They have a 12-game lead in the AL Central and a formula that worked reasonably well last year without hitting, which they now have, if not in abundance then at least in sufficiency.

The Yankees, Blue Jays and Astros all appear poised to join K.C., but at only 10-13 games over .500, a two-week skid could bury any of them. Consider that Toronto rode an 11-game win streak that ended this weekend to climb from also-ran to favorite. At the same time the Yankees blew an eight-game lead over the Jays to fall temporarily into second. New York is elderly and its mound corps is spotty. For Toronto, spotty is an improvement. The Astros are frightfully young, untested and almost entirely relying on two pitchers.

The Angels own the second Wild Card spot, but just five games clear of .500 and a game ahead of Baltimore, two ahead of Tampa, two-and-a-half in front of Minnesota and Texas. Indeed, everyone but Boston, Oakland and Seattle sits within six games of the Wild Card, including Cleveland, the Central's cellar dwellers. Any one of them could catch a fortnight's rocket ride into that last playoff berth.

Indeed, think of recent years' late season fireworks. The AL Champs themselves were barely above .500 well after the All-Star break before claiming the last post-season spot and then the pennant.  The Rangers crash landed in 2013 to miss the playoffs. And the Red Sox and Braves famously choked away the 2011 season by stumbling down the stretch and losing on the last day.

No one knows which team is the one that catapults into the playoffs or slides out of them, which is why, if you peruse Baseball Prospectus's playoff odds calculations, the chances of, for example, the Indians, Twins and Tigers entering the post-season are rated at 8.6%, 3.5% and 3.0% respectively. (The A's and BoSox are listed at under one percent. That's the rough equivalent of good night.) But there is an 80% likelihood that it won't be the five teams now occupying those spots.

So if you have a dog in the fight, be neither complacent nor hopeless.  There is a full college season's worth of games remaining.