The Pittsburgh Pirates lost a huge series this week, getting swept by the St. Louis Cardinals. As a result, they dropped in the projected standings, and are currently last in the projected contenders list below. The good news is that Milwaukee is riding a nine game losing streak, and the Braves have been playing .500 ball for quite some time. So while the Pirates were hurt by this last week, they certainly aren’t out of the race.
The playoff odds and projections come from the top three projection sites: Baseball Prospectus, FanGraphs and ClayDavenport.com. Here are the latest projections.
Baseball Prospectus: 82.9 wins, 21.4% chance to make playoffs
The Baseball Prospectus odds dropped about 10%. BP is the lowest on the Pirates right now, as they’re the only projection system of the three that has them below 30%. The Pirates need to pick up two wins in the BP projections to take the second Wild Card spot.
FanGraphs: 83.2 wins, 31.1% chance to make playoffs
FanGraphs has the Pirates with the best odds to make the post-season, which makes this the first time that I can remember that a projection likes the Pirates more than the projections from Clay Davenport. The Pirates are still ranked last of the contenders here, but only need one win for the projected second Wild Card spot.
Clay Davenport: 83.3 wins, 30.6% chance to make playoffs
Clay Davenport is similar to FanGraphs, in that the Pirates only need one more projected win for the second Wild Card spot.
The Competition
Here are the rankings of the NL contenders. To get “contender” status, a team must have a 15% or better to make the playoffs in all three projection systems.
Team | Odds | W | L | |
1 |
Nationals |
99.9 |
93 |
69 |
2 |
Dodgers |
99.3 |
91 |
71 |
3 |
Cardinals |
94.5 |
89 |
73 |
4 |
Giants |
90.3 |
88 |
74 |
5 |
Brewers |
44.5 |
84 |
78 |
6 |
Braves |
42.6 |
84 |
78 |
7 |
Pirates |
27.7 |
83 |
79 |
The Pirates dropped from sixth to seventh this week. They are one win in the projected standings behind the Brewers and the Braves. The second Wild Card spot is currently projected to be decided at 84 wins. That’s why the Pirates still have a shot here. They have been struggling recently, but so have the Brewers and the Braves. The Pirates have an easy schedule coming up against the Cubs, Phillies, and Red Sox. They need to take advantage of this schedule to try and make up ground on those other teams, while hoping that the free-fall continues in Milwaukee. At this point it’s looking like the only playoff hopes for the Pirates will be as the second Wild Card team.