Over the 2026 regular season, the Chicago Cubs scored 850 runs, more than any other team in Major League Baseball. Then the playoffs arrived, and across a two-game Wild Card series against the San Diego Padres, they scored one.
One run.
If you follow MLB from Australia, you probably found out over breakfast. Postseason games here go out live on ESPN via Disney+, and America’s evening games land in our mornings. That means plenty of us check the scores with a coffee in hand and wonder how on earth that happened. If you like a few casino games alongside that morning catch-up, it’s worth reading the terms of any casiny bonus before you start, and keeping it separate from the baseball itself.
The good news is there’s a clear explanation, and it makes October more fun to watch. We’ll look at why the best regular-season team so rarely finishes on top, how short series squeeze a whole season into a handful of nights, and why a red-hot week can be gone by the next round. Some of the most useful evidence comes from statisticians. A peer-reviewed study in the Annals of Applied Statistics compared randomness across North America’s four biggest leagues, and baseball stood out.
October Baseball’s Best-Record Riddle
You’d expect the team with the best record to be the favourite to win it all. On paper, it is, but the record books tell a different story.
MLB.com‘s review of postseason history found that across the first 29 seasons of the Wild Card era (1995 to 2023), the team with the best regular-season record won the World Series only seven times. That’s 24.1%. Going further back made little difference: from 1969 to 1993, the figure was 28%.
The same research looked at teams that won 100 or more games, which is a remarkable season by any standard. Of 43 such teams in the Wild Card era, 11 reached the World Series and six won it.
So what’s going on?
One helpful way to see it is that baseball runs two different competitions, one after the other. The 162-game season rewards depth: a full pitching staff, a bench that can cover injuries and a lineup that keeps producing from April to September. The playoffs reward something much narrower. Can your best three or four pitchers and your key hitters be sharp for a couple of weeks? A team can be brilliant at the first test and simply unlucky in the second.
Once you see it that way, an early exit for a top seed is less of a shock. It’s a different contest with a much smaller sample.
Three Games, One Coin and a Lot of Drama
That smaller sample is where things get interesting, because individual baseball games are closer than most of us assume.
In their 2018 study, Michael Lopez, Gregory Matthews and Benjamin Baumer modelled game outcomes across a decade of MLB, NBA, NFL and NHL play. They found that MLB and NHL games come closest to a coin flip. In baseball, the middle 50% of games sat between roughly 57% and 63% in favour of the better team. It was rare for even the strongest club to have a 70% chance in a single game.
A follow-up analysis in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports put numbers on the comparison:
| Measure | Figure | Source |
| Better team’s chance of winning an average MLB game | 56.6% | Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports |
| Better team’s chance of winning an average NFL game | 67.6% | Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports |
| Lowest-ranked MLB team’s chance of beating the top-ranked team | About 31% | Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports |
| Middle 50% of MLB games (better team’s chance) | 57% to 63% | Annals of Applied Statistics |
Now put those odds into October’s formats. The Wild Card round is best-of-three, the Division Series is best-of-five, and only the League Championship Series and World Series stretch to seven games, according to ESPN’s 2026 bracket.
Data writer Chris Teeter gives a simple example. Over five games, a 100-win team and an 82-win team both project to roughly a 3–2 record. Eighteen wins of difference across a season shrink to about one game. Teeter also estimates that luck explains around 27.8% of the variation in MLB win percentages over a full season. A long season gives that luck time to even out; five games don’t.
This closeness is also a big reason baseball is so watchable. When every game sits near a coin flip, a single pitch can change everything.
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Hot Arms, Cold Bats and Form That Fades
Close odds are only part of the story. In a short series, whoever is hot that particular week can count for more than anything a team did over six months.
The Cubs show this better than anyone. They led MLB in runs and OPS during the regular season, as CBS Sports noted when ranking the playoff lineups. Against San Diego, they hit .129/.229/.145. According to OptaSTATS figures reported by Yahoo Sports, that was the lowest slugging percentage in any multi-game playoff series in MLB history.
You might think that sweep would carry San Diego deep into October. It didn’t. The Padres then lost their Division Series 3–1 to the Milwaukee Brewers.
The American League saw something similar. The New York Yankees outscored the Boston Red Sox 18–2 in a two-game sweep, the largest series run differential under the current Wild Card format. Next up were the Tampa Bay Rays, who swept them 1–0, 5–2 and 4–3.
Pitching is usually what tips these series. In Game 1 of their Division Series, five Chicago White Sox pitchers combined on a three-hitter to beat the Cleveland Guardians 3–0. When a staff is that sharp, even a strong lineup can go a few nights without much to show for it.
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Brekkie With the Bracket
All of these surprises reached Australia while we were waking up, and this year we have extra reason to tune in.
Start with the Chicago White Sox. They lost more than 300 games across the three seasons before this one, then swept the AL West champion Houston Astros in the Wild Card round. FOX Sports noted it was their first playoff series win since 2005.
Then there’s one of our own. Travis Bazzana, the No. 1 pick in the 2024 draft, is playing second base for the Guardians. A decade ago, he was sneaking a look at the 2016 World Series from a classroom in Australia. According to MLB.com, he’s one of only seven Australian-born players ever to appear in the MLB postseason.
His season is a small lesson in how form comes and goes. He posted a .566 OPS in August, then hit .280/.365/.613 in September. Guardians manager Stephen Vogt summed up that late run when he spoke to MLB.com:
“The cool part for me is that when it mattered, when the heat got turned up, so to speak, he answered. He’s come through for us.”
Stephen Vogt, Cleveland Guardians manager
If you’re planning your mornings around the rest of October, here’s what to know:
- Every postseason game streams on ESPN via Disney+ in Australia.
- The Guardians and White Sox Division Series was at 2–1 to Chicago when last updated, so check the latest score.
- The NLCS between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Milwaukee Brewers starts on 11 October (US Eastern time).
- World Series Game 1 lands on 24 October, Australian time.
- A Game 7, if needed, would air here on 1 November.
There’s something fitting about following a sport this unpredictable over breakfast. Last night’s result is waiting when you wake up, and it’s often one nobody expected.
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Embrace the Coin Flip
Put it all together and October makes sense. A long season decides who gets in. After that, short series, near-even games and fleeting hot streaks take over.
It helps to treat October like checking the weather rather than reading a season forecast. You look at who’s pitching tonight and who’s hitting this week, then you enjoy whatever turns up. The 162-game record tells you a team is good; it can’t tell you whether they’ll be good on Tuesday.
There’s plenty left to watch. The League Championship Series are underway, Bazzana’s Guardians are still fighting, and World Series Game 1 arrives on the morning of 24 October.
Our advice is simple: watch the starting pitchers, hold your predictions loosely and enjoy the surprises. After all, where’s the fun in a finals series everyone can call in advance?
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