The All-Star break has become the annual time of stock-taking. Because the draft has been pushed back to coincide (loosely, in an intrusive and ill-conceived counterprogramming sort of way) with All-Star festivities, no team really commits itself to either buying or selling in the trade market before mid-July. Too many of their resources are devoted, until then, to the draft. Besides, under the 12-team playoff format, it’s harder than ever to gain real clarity about your status in the budding playoff race. It’s a bit ludicrous; 60% of the season has slipped past. For most teams, over 70% will be played before the deadline itself. But this is the world we live in.

There’s a morass in the middle this summer. Try to act surprised. Increasingly, the bigger playoff format and the lack of real prestige attached to winning the division or posting a record that signifies regular-season excellence have conspired to make everyone feel like they’re halfway in the race. Teams are slower to give up on seasons, but slower, too, to pull the trigger on an old-fashioned go-for-it deal. Before the deadline can take shape, we need to know who the sellers will be—from which clubs others might seek short-term help. It’s harder than ever to build that list.

PECOTA is not the engine every team is using to level-set, but I think the best way to guess at what teams are thinking—or, better yet, to establish what they should be thinking, because a lot of them are surely thinking wrongly—is to use our Playoff Odds, based on PECOTA projections for rest-of-season performance. We don’t have the luxury of raiding teams’ front offices and pulling out each of their internal engines for such projections, so we’ll lean on our own. The philosophical question left to us after making that kind of choice is: How much of a chance should you have, in order not to become a seller in the summer? Let’s consider three possible thresholds.