The Giants' postseason odds

The Giants are 7-9 so far this year, and I can think of almost 10 records I'd prefer them to have. But while it's hard to see them as a playoff team right now, considering that they're playing badly, how has this poor of a record affected their chances to reach the postseason? Let's look at the odds some smart people have come up with.

Baseball Prospectus runs a playoff odds report every day, which you can find here. Through the magic of technology, if you click on that link tomorrow at the same time, the numbers will be different. Someday I'll figure out how they do that. These odds take into account a lot of factors: the team's current record, the records of the other teams in their division, the presence of Jupiter within certain constellations, the records of the other teams in their league, the strength of schedule that each team has, geopolitical strife in South Asia, the projected talent level of each team, and anything else that might affect a team.

At the beginning of the year, BP said that the Giants had a 41.4% chance of making the playoffs. At their highest point, on April 10, their odds were at 56.3%. After last night's loss, those odds dropped to 37.4%. After taking into account the various hitting and pitching slumps the team is going through, that's not bad! That's also not good – good would be in the 80s, where the Dodgers have been hanging out all year – but it's not a disaster.

But how many teams really make the playoffs after starting 7-9? It has to happen sometimes, right? How about last year? Was any playoff team last year that bad?

Yes! The Rangers! Thanks, Rangers. How about the year before?

Oh. So out of the last 20 playoff teams, exactly one had a record as bad as the 2016 Giants. That's not incredibly promising, huh? Well, let's look at the two years before that, because I already made the tables and so I might as well use them. They also take up space, which makes it look like I wrote more, and I enjoy that. First, 2013:

Now 2012:

Hey, that's much better! Five out of these twenty teams made the playoffs with records as bad as or worse than the Giants, so that's a much more hopeful ray of hope than we had just a minute ago.

Is it too early to be talking about playoff odds? Yes, it certainly is. But it's also too early to have any sort of despair about how things are going. The Giants are a good team having a bad run, and that bad run has obviously been a negative, but it's not a crippling one. It doesn't have to mean any more than that.