Quote:
Originally Posted by joehart
Also, don’t underestimate the wildcard teams. For some reason they are often very hot and get through the early rounds.
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The obvious reason is that statistically, the second most talented team in each league will have the misfortune to be placed in the same division with the first most talented team 1/3 of the time.
And if you do the math, there's only a 22 percent chance that the three most talented teams in a given league will be placed in three separate divisions... That means that whatever the records were from unbalanced scheduling across divisions, there remains a 78% chance that at least one of the Wild Card teams is actually a better team than one of the division winners.
And for those who want to know, the chance that the 3 best teams in a league all had the bad luck to be placed in the same division of death..... 11%. For them to survive the unbalanced schedule and get two WC's out of one division would mean they need to be waaaaay better than the pack, but this happens.
More typically, you see two WC's from the same division not because the second and third best teams were in that division, but because the two WORST teams were in that division, so the other three teams ran up their win totals.
This year is the 50th anniversary of baseball ditching fairness (everyone in a league plays everyone else the same number of times) in favor of revenue. Sadly, most fans could not care less.