One of dozens of cool toys over at Baseball Prospectus is their Playoff Odds Generator. Statmaster Clay Davenport is the Oz behind the curtain of this one, which every day, runs 1 million independent computer simulations of rest of the season. It does this using each team’s “expected winning percentages” (EWP). As best I can tell, this is somewhere between the team’s performance so far and .500, though you can read it for yourself.
Anyway, the latest report (not including Wednesday’s game) shows the Reds making the playoffs 56.6% of the time, which is actually the second-best figure in the NL (the Mets are at 80%). Out of the 1,000,000 simulations, the Reds won the division 47% of the time (Cards are second at 38%), and the wild card spot 9.7% of the time (Phoenix, LA, SF, and StL all got that more often).
The Pirates only make the post-season 0.47% of the time, and the Cubs are at 0.85%.
EDITED: After last night’s win, the Reds got a nice jump. They’re now winning the division 52% of the time (vs. 34% for StL), and making the playoffs 62% of the time.ÂÂ