KC Royals Odds Have Been Slimmer Than You Think

The KC Royals pulled off another unlikely comeback Monday against the Houston Astros to force a fifth game.

The odds of the Kansas City Royals winning that game after trailing by four runs after seven innings were indeed slim.

Before the chaos unraveled on Monday afternoon, I got a message from a fellow KC native during the break before the eighth inning began.

"“Well, we’ve done it before.”"

“Yeah…” I thought to myself, but remembered specifically seeing how the odds of Oakland winning that game last season were something like 97 percent going into the eighth.

After all, last year’s Wild Card game marked the first time in Major League Baseball history that a team had rallied from being down four or more runs in the eighth inning or later, and come back to win an elimination game.

Surely it couldn’t happen again, for the same winning team, one year later…right? It felt like coming back from both games was beyond the realm of “playoff baseball” and “anything can happen” concepts.

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After experiencing the insanity of two similarly outlandish comebacks, much less one year apart from one another in elimination games, I couldn’t get these odds out of my head.

Once things had settled down after the game, I had to check how stacked the odds were against us this time around. If anything, it certainly felt like even more hope was lost after the Astros’ seventh inning.

If Terrance Gore’s replay-turned-out call wasn’t depressing enough, Correa and Rasmus put an exclamation point on the looming end to the KC Royals 2015 “statement of a season”. As it turned out, the chances were even slimmer than last year – entering the eighth, down 6-2, the Royals had a 1.6 percent chance of winning the game.

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So 2.9 percent and 1.6 percent – these are not good odds. For some perspective, the Chiefs, post-Bears and sans Charles, still have a 4 percent chance of making the NFL playoffs this year.

What’s even crazier to me are the odds of both of these things happening.

If you’re a Royals fan, and you were to tune into each of these elimination games at the top of the eighth, the odds of the Royals winning both games would be .046 percent – not even half of a tenth of one percent.

In other words, it’s about 1 out of 2,155. That’s 2,155 opportunities, not games, although 2,155 games would still be about a dozen seasons worth of baseball.

And yes, we’re taking two very specific moments of two very specific games and ignoring all the times the Royals didn’t come back, but this was far, far away from a likely outcome.

It’s not a perfect science, but the odds were slim. As in, back to the Chiefs analogy, about 15 times less likely than KC to win the Super Bowl this year, as of today.

They’re also equal to what one British bookmaker estimated the chances were of a Christmas zombie apocalypse a couple years back.

While the magic of Game four becomes a moot point if the Kansas City Royals can’t put together a victory Wednesday night, it’s still a pleasant reminder of the unrelenting resiliency of these guys, win or lose, day in and day out.

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