Angels have a 25% shot at the playoffs - Get hyped!

Many Halos Heaven readers are familiar with FanGraphs and all their awesome stats.  Some of you are also probably familiar with FiveThirtyEight.  If you are not, and you like statistics and predictive modeling, you should definitely be checking out this page.  They do a a lot around sports in general and they also do political modeling.

FiveThirtyEight has a lot of great info on MLB and has recently released their game by game predictions and a final season prediction that changes after every matchup.  Currently, FiveThirtyEight has the Angels at a 25% chance to make the playoffs, which is probably best odds I've seen anywhere - so it's time to get hyped right??

Of course they also have us a 78-84 record, but those are minor details when a sub .500 record could still get you into the playoffs.

How does it work?  If you want to read all the fine details, you can do so.  However, in short, they assign a rating to each team (average is 1500), and after each game, the winner gets points and loser, well, loses points.  The amount of points in play is based on pitcher ability, park factors, travel, etc.  Ie., if you are the Braves and you beat Kershaw at Dodger Stadium, you are probably going to gain a lot of points.

You can also find an awesome tool called "Complete History of MLB" that shows the entire history of each team, and gives you the ability to compare to other teams throughout history.

In the above comparison, you can see the Rangers climb above the Angels in total score during the September 2015 surge into the playoffs (and currently remain there).

The Angels rating is now at 1500 points (Yay - we are average!) as you can see on the Angels page.  This page will also gives you upcoming (and previous) game predictions:

These ratings will adjust as the game gets closer, as starting pitchers are announced, and as previous starts from pitchers are added in to the calculations.

For the record, the Angels had a 54% chance of winning last night's game, so the win did not do much to our total point value, and tonight's game is currently listed at 50%.

Hope you enjoy digging through the data and charts!