Nate Silver 538

[Jopal78]

For what it's worth Nate Silver has Milwaukee's chance at making the playoffs down to 60%, and predicting the Braves, Brewers and Diamondbacks to all finish at 88-74.

 

Cubs with 93 wins, Dodgers with 91 wins, Phillies with 89 wins.

 

The three blow out losses in the last week, have sure turned off the analytics crew to Milwaukee's chances.

[bill hAll Star]

For what it's worth Nate Silver has Milwaukee's chance at making the playoffs down to 60%, and predicting the Braves, Brewers and Diamondbacks to all finish at 88-74.

 

Cubs with 93 wins, Dodgers with 91 wins, Phillies with 89 wins.

 

The three blow out losses in the last week, have sure turned off the analytics crew to Milwaukee's chances.

 

Well, it's not really a crew of humans making decisions based off of analytics. It's just a system/model and it spits out the results with basically no human intervention.

 

Losing several games against easier competition lowers your chances because it inherently hurts your probability of getting to the amount of games required to make the playoffs or win the division (say 93 or 94 in this case).

[JosephC]

60% seems just about right to me. Cubs will very likely win the division. Then the Brewers SHOULD be battling with 2 teams from the east and 1 team from the west for one of the two wild card spots. So 4 teams for 2 spots....basically would be 50/50 if all teams sat in the same position but the Brewers get bumped up to 60% because the Nationals are 5.5 games behind them. I fully realize the Cards, Rockies, Pirates are all ahead of the Nationals currently, but I simply believe the Brewers have a better roster than those teams and should finish ahead of them (assuming no more major injuries). I still think the Nationals are prime to make a strong charge late in the year. So probably Phillies, Cubs, Dodgers as division winners, with the Brewers, Braves, Nationals and Diamondbacks for those two wild card spots.

 

It's kind of a shame that the Brewers had those two series with the Diamondbacks really close to one another early in the year. Would be fun to see the two teams match up now to get more current comparison. Sure, three games really wouldn't mean that much but still would make for an interesting watch.

[OldSchoolSnapper]

We're going to blow this in the last week. Not really blow, since you can't really blow with a one game lead. But I fully anticipate disaster in September and us missing the WC.

[owbc]

It seems like the ebbs and flows of the season have balanced out and we're right back where we expected to be at the start of the season.

 

They were on 95-100 win pace for a while...did anyone ever think this team would win 100 or even 95 games?

[BrewCrewForever]

I figure 87-88, so just a few games better than 2017. But that should be enough hopefully to snag a Wild Card and get in the dance. Then see what happens.

[Boomer5]

Pythagorean puts us at about 86 wins and their 500 trend puts us at 88 wins.

[LouisEly]

Pythagorean puts us at about 86 wins and their 500 trend puts us at 88 wins.

Pythagorean has plenty of flawed assumptions. It assumes that each team is putting out it's best lineup every inning, and that's not the case. When a team is up or down significantly late in the game they don't have their best lineup on the field, and they certainly don't when they have a position player pitching (which sometimes works, and sometimes results in giving up 21 runs in a game). That affects total runs scored, which affects +/-.

 

It also does not take into account the difference in talent between starters and reserves, or between #1-2 starters and #4-5 starters. For example, a team can have four great starting pitchers but have a really bad 5th starter - if the 5th starter gets blown out or frequently pitches poorly resulting in lopsided losses, then that will affect the +/- of runs scored even though they will still win a lot of games.

 

Teams don't care if they win by one run or ten runs, they care if they win and will manage so that they win the most number of games over the course of a long 162-game season and not score/prevent the maximum number of runs every inning of every game.