Simulating every team's chances of reaching October

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Fans of teams across the country are asking themselves just about every day of the baseball season whether or not their team has a shot at the playoffs. With a schedule that's twice as long as the other major professional sports and the Wild Card keeping more teams in contention than ever before, baseball fans are subject to day-to-day mood swings that would make Britney Spears look stable. In just a little bit more than two weeks, Mariners fans went from printing playoff tickets to drafting eulogies. Over the course of a couple of months, the Yankees went from being the worst team that money could buy -- ever -- to Wild Card leaders with a puncher's chance in the postseason.

So how do you know exactly how your favorite team's chances look today? That's where Baseball Prospectus' Playoff Odds Report, created by Clay Davenport, come in handy. Every day, we take the standings and assign each team a ranking based on their runs scored and runs allowed for the season, smoothed out to eliminate distortions caused by ballpark effects and strong or weak schedules. Then we simulate the season a million times and tally up who made the playoffs and who didn't.

Why a million times? Well, we're fans of the Austin Powers movies, but more important, it's a lot to ask of us to simulate the season a billion times before breakfast. The results of the simulated seasons are set out as a percentage, so if the Report says your team has a 25.00000% chance of winning the division, that means that your team won the division in 250,000 of our million simulations. If your team has a 0.00020% chance, that meant that out of one million simulated seasons, somehow your team (for example, the Pirates) managed a miraculous playoff run -- twice. If you're a Pirates fan, I wouldn't clear your schedule for October based on that. For more on the methodology of the Report, click here. (Updated as of Tuesday morning.)

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