Pure Baseball Community

After another year of PB playoffs a big question for me was: It sure seems like the better team loses more than you’d think likely; is it different than in MLB or just the nature of short series?

I took a look at all the post-seasons since playoffs began in 1969 and listed out the Champions rank in regular season wins, both in their league and in all of MLB. I wanted to see how often the better teams, at least in terms of regular season records, won the World Series and how that compared to PB.

The first thing I was surprised by was how seldom the team with the best record in baseball won it all, just 22% of the time. The Series winner had the best record in their own league 53% of the time. If the bar is set that low PB winners should clear it handily as there are super strong (110+ win) teams all the time in PB but not in MLB.

In PB this season the Champion had the best regular season record in the league 41% of the time. The Champs had the best record in their own circuit 56% of the time. What conclusions can we draw from this:

• PB, where the strongest teams are generally stronger than the strongest MLB teams, had those teams crowned Championships more than MLB, 41% to 22%. This makes sense because the teams that led the MLB in wins averaged 102 wins while the top PB teams averaged 108
• The eventual Champ had the best record in their own league/circuit about the same in each, 53% in MLB and 56% in PB
• You don’t have to even be the best team in your own circuit when 44% of the winners were not
• The monster teams (Best team in the whole league in PB) lost 59% of the time. Stop complaining and strengthen your team, make the playoffs and take a shot. You don’t have to win 110 games to win the title because
• Short series are inherently almost random. It’s a crapshoot
• PB does a very good job of replicating the MLB playoffs

I’ve included the full data below. I didn’t count 1994 or 1981 due to work stoppages.