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Originally Posted by mrreality68
Both wild card match ups should be fun.
Just amazing that a 106 game winning team is in the wild card game.
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Yet another reason why people often say "baseball is all luck". The Dodgers were the best team in baseball this season (and by a sizeable margin as well). They have an SRS of 1.6 vs the Giants 1.2, which is a better predictor of playoff success than is total wins or even Pythagorean wins (and they had 109 PWs vs the Giants 101). Yet, here they are in a one-game playoff just for a shot at a series against the inferior Giants (albeit with a slightly better record).
Here's an interesting and relevant excerpt from
The Drunkard's Walk that I often reference when discussing statistical probabilities in baseball with my friends...
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Originally Posted by Leonard Mlodinow
…if one team is good enough to warrant beating another in 55% of its games, the weaker team will nevertheless win a 7-game series about 4 times out of 10. And if the superior team could beat its opponent, on average, 2 out of 3 times they meet, the inferior team will still win a 7-game series about once every 5 match-ups. There is really no way for a sports league to change this. In the lopsided 2/3-probability case, for example, you’d have to play a series consisting of at minimum the best of 23 games to determine the winner with what is called statistical significance, meaning the weaker team would be crowned champion 5 percent or less of the time. And in the case of one team’s having only a 55-45 edge, the shortest significant “world series” would be the best of 269 games, a tedious endeavor indeed! So sports playoff series can be fun and exciting, but being crowned “world champion” is not a reliable indication that a team is actually the best one. (p. 70-71)
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