About 7 seasons ago, I finally realigned the league back to 36 teams (we have gone and down over the centuries...not worth recalling.) because I found a bunch of schedules to use that fit my format (3 divisions per subleague)
With that change, I expanded the playoffs again so we went from 12 teams (3 wild cards, 3 division champs) to 18 teams, but it's structured so that the two 2 teams in each subleague get double-byes to the division series, the worst division champion does play in a Elimination Series after the wild cards duke it out in a one-game playoff.
FORMAT
WILD CARD GAME (1)
ELIMINATION SERIES (BEST OF 3)
DIVISION SERIES (BEST OF 5)
LEAGUE CHAMPIONSHIP (BEST OF 7)
GALACTIC SERIES (BEST OF 9)
Since the new format, only 3 wild cards have made the title series and only one has won.
That team: The New Mexico Suns, who went 82-80 in a middling regular season, squeaked into the post-season tied for the 6th wild card, but then the post-season happened and they went wild.
The trick is, they were the 2nd best hitting team in baseball and started hitting once the post-season started up. Their pitching wasn't bad, it just performed badly in their stadium.
I went back through the archives to see what similar teams were bad historically. I found two notable ones:
Quote:
1813 Eau Claire Paws (81-81)
1937 Brookyln Originals (76-86)
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The difference is, both these teams won their divisions en route to their titles. Pretty wild that an 8th place team in the league won a title and while it kinda feels like blasphemy, the fact they were a power hitting team that won 95 games the year after their title, made me feel like they were just really unlikely in their title season during the regular season and started to play up to their talent level once the playoffs hit.
I'll take a few wild cards like that over leaving 90+ win teams at home because of weird divisions or letting flukey division champs claim titles simply because they were in a weak setup.
Still, the fact that it took about 296 seasons or so until a bad team won a title again is pretty surprising.