Quantifying Hope: Consecutive Series Wins See Playoff Odds Hovering Around 42%

As a fan of meatloaf, I’d be perfectly fine eating it somewhat frequently. But if we’re talking about how two out of three ain’t bad, a phrase coined by the late Marvin Lee Aday and later used by Joe Maddon, it’s going to take a lot more than two series wins to help the Cubs. Though they’re in a better spot than last week, their 41.7% playoff odds still sit behind every NL Central team other than the woebegone Reds.

I’ll spare you any more exposition than is necessary, which is actually none, since you are surely aware of what the Cubs have been doing lately. Or what they haven’t been doing, which is putting up enough runs each game to ensure an increased frequency of success. It actually reminds me a lot of my son’s 17U team, which had fallen into quite an offensive funk with a run of games against stacked opponents.

But hey, both of my preferred teams are winning more than they’re losing lately. I even got to witness a walk-off win in their latest game, which featured a complete game with 12 strikeouts from a kid I know pretty well. Now I just want to breathe easy the rest of the afternoon, though I’m not sure that wish is coming true. With the Brewers off to the races yet again, the rest of the season will be like eating an elephant.

Unless Joey Chestnut is helping, the only way to take down a massive pachyderm is a bite at a time. The Cubs just need to keep taking two of three or three of four so they can gain a little ground here and there without another backslide. Easier said than done, especially with pitchers in short supply, but it’s no less true. They’re still very much in the Wild Card race and can find themselves in solid playoff position with a big weekend.

Then again, they could just as easily fall back if the same issues with run-scoring crop up against the Blue Jays. There’s been a surge of takes across the landscape that things have gone too far sideways to consider a positive regression to the mean a given, and I get that. At the same time, there are some very good players performing so poorly that some form of improvement should still be expected.

Or maybe we’ll eventually look back on this season as one in which Pete Crow-Armstrong made like 1987 Andre Dawson by dragging his team’s corpse through the summer and early fall. Boy, that would sure be fun.