With May turning into June, we're now roughly a third of the way through baseball's marathon, and excuses start to look anemic. When your team is struggling or exceeding expectations after April, you can tell yourself it's still early. It's much easier to chalk up disappointments to the small-sample-size fairies, and it's fun to poke holes in the prognosticators' poor predictions.
But when that calendar creeps out of May, excuses are harder to accept, because many results are now baked into the cake. For this set of updated ZiPS mean standings and playoff probabilities, we added something a little different. We've included updated strength-of-schedule data, based on each team's roster strengths, the remaining schedule and the distribution of home and road games.
Why does this matter? Playoff races aren't typically about crushing your opponents, with most teams in baseball winning between 40 and 60 percent of their games over the course of a 162-game season, a relatively small separation betweens success and failure. So a win here and a loss there can make a very big difference.
Baseball plays an imbalanced schedule, and when you add in the fact that there's a slight schedule benefit to being an excellent team than a terrible one -- the Cubs never have to play the Cubs and the Padres never get the benefit of playing the Padres -- there's a good deal of variation in strength of schedule among teams. And when the wild cards are drawn across divisions, that can be very important.
American League East
The first thing you see from the standings is the very real cost of the Toronto Blue Jays' early-season hole. ZiPS still thinks the Jays are a solid team, with a roster that projects at .533, barely down from .537 at the start of the season. But missing those four wins is nearly crippling, costing the Jays a fifth of a playoff appearance.
The New York Yankees project as the flip side of the Jays. Even though ZiPS sees the Yankees as only having improved their outlook from .500 to .515, the solid start gives the Yankees the most improved playoff odds in the American League. ZiPS believes players such as Aaron Judge are for real. In Judge's case, he is projected to lead the league in homers and finish third in WAR among right fielders, behind just Bryce Harper and Mookie Betts, who you may have heard of.
American League Central
The amusing thing in the AL Central is how the projections for the Cleveland Indians have improved even though ZiPS actually thinks the roster is slightly worse than it did in March.
What has changed? In this case, the Detroit Tigers and Kansas City Royals have both underperformed and seen their upsides nearly collapse. The Twins are in first place, but the pitching depth is still a grave concern, and the computer thinks Cleveland has a much easier go of it than it thought before the season.
American League West
With an 11-game lead in the AL West, the Houston Astros are making the division fairly uninteresting. This is bad news for the Chicago White Sox, in that Houston has long been connected to acquiring lefty Jose Quintana, and the easier it is for the Astros to win the division, the less motivation there is for them to drastically overpay for Quintana.
As long as Houston expects a Collin McHugh return before the playoffs, the team's not going to be pushed hard to upgrade Joe Musgrove or Mike Fiers, neither of whom are likely to get any postseason starts. No American League team has seen its expectations collapse more than the Seattle Mariners. Add a lousy start to the fact almost the entire rotation is injured, except for a struggling Yovani Gallardo, and you've got a team that ZiPS once saw as a serious wild-card contender but now sees as a long shot.
National League East
The New York Mets' record and position in the standings are already bad enough news, but the fact that they got to this point with the easiest schedule in baseball is more like some kind of (zombie/robot/ninja/pirate) apocalypse. Sure, the Washington Nationals received the benefit of a weak schedule as well, but unlike the Mets, they were able to cash in on it.
ZiPS wasn't very high on the Miami Marlins during the preseason, projecting only 75 wins, one of the lowest among the prognosticators. Now it's looking worse. Though the Marlins think they're a contender, ZiPS places them with the other NL East also-rans, who are rebuilding their franchises.
National League Central
Writing off the Chicago Cubs is dangerous, but as strong as the roster remains, two months of .500 ball is still two months of .500 ball, and there's less time to run away with the division. Of any team projected as the favorite in its respective division, the Cubs now have the worst projected playoff odds. The team is still talented enough to go through a 30-10 stretch, and it wouldn't be shocking, but the window of opportunity is open for the rest of the division.
National League West
This division features the teams with the largest and smallest changes in projections at the thirdway mark (thirdway should be a word, at least). While ZiPS was positive about the Colorado Rockies coming into the season, placing them firmly among the wild-card contenders, the Rockies have done quite a bit more than that. ZiPS isn't sold that they're really better than a .500 team -- it's hard to see Colorado's team ERA+ being above 120 by year-end -- but nothing can take away the wins already banked from the first two months.
The loss of Madison Bumgarner for a large chunk of the season, combined with the various disappointments in the starting rotation (Johnny Cueto, Matt Moore) and a lineup with only two starters above a 100 OPS+, makes the San Francisco Giants a .500 team in ZiPS' silicon eyes. While a schedule that's 17 points easier in June-September than April-May is nice, the Giants are probably too far back to make it interesting, sans a historical, once-in-a-few-generations type of comeback (see also: 1951 New York Giants).
The San Diego Padres have lost one win from their preseason projections and didn't see their playoff chances get any worse. That's something, I guess.