And in which of them do the Diamondbacks make the playoffs?
We’re entering the final series of the season! Well, that is, if you don’t include the teams that still are finishing up their last series, or the Mets and Braves, who will finish it on the Monday after the season…
Especially given the extra complexities of that doubleheader (that might not even get played?), I wanted to think through the various scenarios. When could the Diamondbacks clinch before the doubleheader?
I started on a sheet of scratch paper, calculating some various things out. For instance, the Diamondbacks can clinch before the doubleheader if one of two things happen:
- They match or exceed the average performance of the Mets and Braves put together.
- They go 1-2, the Mets go 3-0, and the Braves go 0-3.
But the manual approach soon became unwieldy when it came to more difficult questions around the timing of when they would clinch. So I turned to my favorite tool — Google Sheets — and came up with this massive spreadsheet.
You’ll want to open it up in a browser on your computer — it’s currently way too big to embed here (or probably to view properly on mobile). Here’s a general overview:
- The heading (top 7 rows) have the summarized highlights which you can probably focus on.
- The rest (currently 4096 rows) each contain one possible set of outcomes for all remaining (currently 12) games with playoff relevance to the Diamondbacks. Those are the underlying computation for where the results you see in the top come from. They’re arranged in a way that hopefully makes sense, so nearby rows (usually) have similar beginnings.
Those scenarios then form the basis for all other computations. Wherever you see percentages, they are a fraction out of the total number of scenarios — which you can also consider a projection if you treat all of these games as coin flips. (You can see that projection mode in Fangraphs, too — once they get the rescheduled doubleheader properly entered into their database.) And coin flips really aren’t that bad an approximation — every game is between teams who are (right now) at most 3.5 games apart in the standings.
Here’s what I have computed that you might want to know:
- In the heading in the first several columns, you can see when the Dbacks can clinch either the playoffs or a particular seed, or be eliminated — the playoffs-or-not part of that is also reflected by the color-coding in the table of scenarios below. This assumes games finish in the order they start, which might not be true, especially on the final day of the season. You can just mentally group the numbers in those columns together.
- Next is probably the most interesting question to all of us: In how many scenarios overall will the Diamondbacks make the playoffs?
- You might also care about seeding — this also computes the number of scenarios that each team is each particular seed.
- If the Diamondbacks make the playoffs, who do they play? This is also listed.
- Finally, will the doubleheader be played after all? I compute the number of scenarios where it is meaningless, both to all seeds, and to which teams make the playoffs.
I plan to update this table after the result of each game is known, which will halve the number of scenarios/rows.