Your Team in 10,000 Universes: The 2025 Dodgers
Same roster. Same schedule. Same matchups. Ten thousand different seasons. Where did the real Dodgers land?
We simulated the Dodgers' 2025 season ten thousand times.
Same roster. Same schedule. Same pitching probabilities for every single game. The only thing that changed was luck — the random bounce of a 162-game season playing out over and over again.
The real Dodgers went 93-69. Good team. Playoff team. But was that the most likely outcome? Were they lucky? Unlucky? Let's find out.
How It Works
For each of the Dodgers' 162 games, our Elo model generated a win probability based on the matchup — factoring in starting pitching, home-field advantage, and team strength. Then we ran 10,000 simulated seasons, flipping a weighted coin for every game.
The Dodgers' average per-game win probability was .563 — the mark of a genuinely strong team. Over 162 games, that translates to an expected win total right around 91 wins.
The Distribution
The most common outcome? Right around 91 wins — exactly where the math says it should land. The standard deviation was 6.3 wins, meaning in roughly two-thirds of all universes, the Dodgers won somewhere between 85 and 97 games.
But the tails are where it gets interesting.
The best universe: 117 wins. A historically dominant season. The kind of year where everything breaks right — every close game goes your way, every coin flip lands heads. It happened exactly once in ten thousand tries.
The worst universe: 67 wins. A disaster. The kind of season that gets a manager fired by June and has talk radio calling for a full rebuild. That also happened just twice.
The Headline Numbers
- In 60.7% of universes, the Dodgers won 90+ games
- In 30.3%, they won 95+ games
- In 9.3%, they cracked 100 wins
- In 4.3%, they finished below .500
Read that last one again. A team with the Dodgers' talent — this Dodgers team, the one with Ohtani and Betts and a $300M payroll — finished under .500 in more than four out of every hundred simulated seasons. That's not a rounding error. That's the reality of a 162-game season.
Where Did the Real Dodgers Land?
The actual 93-win season landed at the 57.7th percentile of all simulated outcomes. Translation: the real Dodgers slightly outperformed their expected talent level, but not by much. They were a 91-win true-talent team that ran a little hot and ended up at 93.
Nothing fluky. Nothing suspicious. Just a good team being good, with a small nudge from fortune.
The Peak of the Bell Curve
The densest part of the distribution ran from about 84 to 98 wins. That 14-game range contained the vast majority of outcomes. In the real world, 84 wins might mean watching October from home. 98 wins might mean home-field advantage through the playoffs. Same team. Same talent. Just variance.
The single most common win total was 90 wins (641 universes), closely followed by 93 (604 universes) and 92 (605 universes). The real outcome was right in the heart of the distribution.
What This Actually Tells Us
Baseball is long. 162 games is a massive sample size compared to the NFL's 17 or the NBA's 82. And still, random variance can swing a season by 10+ wins in either direction.
This is why single-season records can be misleading. A team that wins 98 games isn't necessarily better than one that wins 91. They might be the exact same team — one just caught more breaks. The 2025 Dodgers could have won 98 in a luckier universe or 84 in an unluckier one, and nothing about the underlying team would have changed.
The next time someone tells you a 92-win team was obviously better than an 88-win team, remember: in our simulation, the same Dodgers roster produced both of those outcomes thousands of times. The gap between them is mostly noise.
The Bottom Line
The 2025 Dodgers were a legitimately excellent baseball team. Our model had them winning about 56.3% of their games, and they delivered almost exactly that. In the grand multiverse of possible seasons, they landed right where you'd expect — slightly above the median, comfortably in the playoff picture, with a season that was neither their ceiling nor their floor.
In 9,574 out of 10,000 universes, this team finished above .500. In 934 of them, they were a 100-win juggernaut. In 2, they were a 67-win catastrophe.
All the same team. All the same talent. Just the beautiful, maddening randomness of baseball.