MLB Clinching & Elimination Tracker

Every club's percentage comes from simulating the rest of the season 25,000 times using the real remaining schedule. Each team's strength is its winning percentage regressed toward .500, each game is priced with a log5 matchup calculation plus home-field advantage, and the standard MLB tiebreakers are resolved inside every simulated season. The percentage is an estimate of how often a club reaches the postseason across those runs. It is not a prediction, and it never changes the clinched or eliminated statuses on this page, which are mathematical proofs. Once a club is mathematically in or out, its figure is fixed at 100% or 0%.

Twelve clubs qualify — six per league — as three division winners plus three Wild Cards. A club therefore needs either to finish first in its division or to finish among the three best remaining records in its league. Every team row on this page states its current position, the countdown that applies to it, and in plain English what has to change in the standings.

For a club currently holding a playoff place, the playoff magic number is the combined number of its own wins and losses by the best club outside the playoff field that would guarantee it finishes ahead. RosterSpin calculates it as the boundary club's greatest reachable win total, minus the subject club's current wins, plus one.

A magic number only makes sense for a club that currently occupies a qualifying place. A club outside the field is chasing, so the useful countdown is its elimination number: the combined number of its own losses and wins by the club holding the third Wild Card that would conventionally end the chase.

It means the club trails the current holder of the third and final Wild Card place by three games in the standings. Games behind combines the win gap and the loss gap and halves the total, so a club three games back must gain three games — through its own wins, the other club's losses, or both — simply to draw level.

No. Drawing level only creates a tie. MLB no longer plays a Game 163: ties for a postseason place are broken mathematically, starting with head-to-head record between the tied clubs, then record inside the division, then record inside the league, then league record over the later part of the schedule. RosterSpin says a club needs to gain X games to draw level, not that gaining X games qualifies it.

They answer different questions. A magic or elimination number is conventional two-team countdown arithmetic against a single boundary club. RosterSpin's status comes from a qualification solver that tests the entire remaining schedule for every club in the league and applies the MLB tiebreak ladder, so it can prove a clinch or an elimination that the countdown has not reached, and it can decline to assert one at all.

It is the combined number of wins by the division leader and losses by its closest challenger needed to guarantee the leader finishes ahead. RosterSpin derives it from the challenger's actual remaining schedule, which over a full 162-game season is the same as 163 minus the leader's wins minus the challenger's losses.

Yes. If the leading club wins and the relevant rival loses on the same day, both halves of the countdown move and the number falls by two.

Twelve — six per league. Each league sends its three division winners plus three Wild Card clubs.

It means games still to be played could change the MLB tiebreaker that would decide qualification. Rather than publish a clinch or an elimination that a tiebreak could reverse, RosterSpin leaves the status undetermined.