Quote:
Originally Posted by cephasjames
While LGO has shown some rare instances in the history of major league baseball where teams, record-wise, who were not in the top 1, 2, 3, or 4, made the postseason, for the first 153 years of existence no 5th or 6th best teams, record-wise, has ever made the postseason without also winning their division.
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To be fair, divisions have only been around for 55 seasons (two-division leagues for 25 seasons and three-division leagues for 30 seasons). You can't really compare pre-1969 to post-1969 because the pre-1969 seasons never had the opportunity for an overall lower-placed team overall to qualify.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cephasjames
The argument Brad is making is those teams don't deserve to be there. There is no president, after all, for them being in the postseason, let alone in the World Series.
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There is what seems to me a contradiction in his argument. He wants only the 'best' teams to be there, and in his view only the top finishers in a single-division league over a long season qualifies. Okay, that's fine, but . . .
What's the point of the World Series since it is far too short to determine which of the contesting teams is truly the better club? An 'undeserving' team could easily be crowned World Series champion because the competition is too short.
(This raises an interesting statistical question: how many times would two teams have to play in order to reliably determine which is the better club? Ten games? Twenty games? Thirty games? I'm sure some SABR stats guru has attempted to answer the question.)