What 10,000 season simulations say about the NL Central
We simulate the rest of the season every night. In the NL Central that is not a race at the top, it is a coronation: the Brewers win the division in 96 percent of them.
Every night, after the last game goes final, we play the rest of the 2026 season out ten thousand times. Each run simulates all 1,389 remaining games, then the full postseason bracket on top of them, and tallies who finishes where. Run that way, most divisions are genuine races. The NL Central is not. It is a coronation with a real fight going on underneath it.
The standings the model expects
| Team | Record | Division | Playoffs | Win World Series | Projected wins (range) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Milwaukee Brewers | 42-25 | 96.3% | 99.9% | 8.2% | 100.3 (94–106) |
| St. Louis Cardinals | 38-30 | 3.0% | 75.1% | 5.4% | 87.2 (81–93) |
| Chicago Cubs | 36-34 | 0.6% | 41.7% | 3.0% | 83.0 (77–89) |
| Pittsburgh Pirates | 35-35 | 0.1% | 18.7% | 1.5% | 79.9 (74–86) |
| Cincinnati Reds | 32-36 | 0.0% | 1.3% | 0.1% | 73.1 (67–79) |
The “Win World Series” column is the chance a team wins it all. The model also tracks the chance of reaching the World Series, which is a higher number for every team.
A runaway on top
Milwaukee’s 96.3 percent division probability against St. Louis’s 3.0 percent is roughly a 32-to-1 gap. The Brewers are four games up in the standings and project to about 100 wins, with a 10th-to-90th-percentile band of 94 to 106. No other team in the division cracks even one percent to win it. By division share this is one of the least competitive races in baseball.
A real scramble underneath
The actual contest here is for a wild card, and even that has a clear order. St. Louis is essentially a playoff team already at 75.1 percent, almost entirely through the wild card at 72.1 percent rather than the division at 3.0 percent. The Cubs are the true bubble team at 41.7 percent, close to a coin flip. Pittsburgh is a long shot at 18.7 percent. Cincinnati, in the model’s eyes, is effectively done at 1.3 percent.
So the division tells a two-tiered story: a near-decided crown, a near-decided wild card, and then a genuine three-down-to-one scramble, Cubs over Pirates over Reds, for whatever is left. Milwaukee also carries real October upside, an 8.2 percent chance to win the whole thing, near the top of the National League field.
How the simulation works
For each of the ten thousand trials the model simulates every remaining regular-season game, then runs the postseason with the correct best-of-3, best-of-5, and best-of-7 formats and home-field patterns. A single game’s win probability comes from each team’s record shrunk toward a quality prior, combined through the log5 formula, nudged by a home-field factor, and held inside a 0.30 to 0.70 band so no regular-season game is ever treated as more lopsided than 70/30. The quality prior is a blend of the BBMI rankings and last year’s run-differential profile, pulled partway back toward average. Each probability above is that outcome’s share of the ten thousand runs.
What it does and does not know
The current simulation model is record and prior driven, not a game-by-game roster model. It does not look at tomorrow’s starting pitcher, who is hurt, or who just got called up, and trades or injuries after June 13 are not reflected. It is a Monte Carlo, so the smallest numbers jitter by a few tenths of a percent run to run: read the Reds’ 1.3 percent as very small, not as exact. What it captures well is the shape of the race, and the shape here is unusually lopsided. These numbers reflect the model’s current method. A more detailed, roster-aware per-PA simulation is in development.
Disclosure
Analytical and educational content about model performance. Not betting advice.