Geek Stuff — Major League Playoffs

The playoffs are upon us. How did the geeks over at fivethirtyeight do?

They rated each team in baseball every day. Check the footnote at the link to see how they come up with their numbers.

I tracked their numbers for the American League East Division for this season. The answer is, they did pretty good. Plus, three teams in the AL East are in the playoffs (the Yankees and the Red Sox have a one-game Wild Card playoff tonight). 

Overall, not a bad way to look at the game. As we’ve thought most of the year, the Red Sox were overrated and the Blue Jays were underrated. But at the end of the season, the Blue Jays simply could not hold on. For what it’s worth, they were the only team in 538′s top rankings that didn’t make the playoffs. And they had much better numbers than four teams that did.