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PLAYOFF PREVIEW, MLB
Baltimore and Monterrey face off in the best-of-five game Guinness Cup Series in the Continental League. The winner will face Cleveland of MLB in another best-of-five game series, this time taking place in London, England for the right to play in MLB next year.
Meanwhile, in MLB the playoff matchups are:
San Francisco (92-70) v. New York (110-52)
Los Angeles Angels (92-70) V. Atlanta (96-66)
Pittsburgh (93-69) v. Los Angeles Dodgers (93-69)
Brooklyn (108-54) v. St. Louis (90-73)
If I had to put money on it, I'd bet that MLB is hoping for a rematch of the seven-game thriller between New York Mets and Brooklyn that took place in 1997.
Meanwhile, you can expect that there will be a variety of changes in the Continental League going into next year, with MLB considering shortening the CL regular season and possibly expanding the CL playoffs to encourage more teams to "go for it" later in the season. Low attendance numbers for some teams has discouraged MLB from those cities and you can expect some changes in venue for some teams.
Meanwhile, the rousing success of Monterrey and Baltimore in the CL has MLB desperate to get back into that market. The O's drew over 1 million fans. By comparison, the Indians drew just 1.5 million for the entire major league season, while Monterrey drew just under a million for the year in total.
Ed note: The game has done a great job with modeling the attendance figures for what amounts to a Triple-A league. Teams are still playing in ballparks that befit their size in some cases, while others are still in MLB parks (White Sox, Orioles) and yet, we don't have any CL teams drawing more than MLB team, which is accurate. That said, Baltimore's 1 million would be a Triple-A record. Sacramento and Memphis are the only two real life Triple-A teams that have hit 900k+ in recent years.
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