Monday, October 5, 2020

Newsletter Excerpt, October 5, 2020 -- "A's/Astros Preview"

This is a preview of the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider. Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for nearly 25 years.


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"All four Division Series matchups this season feature teams from the same division playing one another, something not possible prior to this year. Since MLB went to the ten-team postseason in 2012, there have been six instances of teams from the same division meeting in a full playoff series (i.e., not the wild card game). The better regular-season team is 5-1 (the 2015 Cardinals, who lost to the Cubs, are the exception). If you take it back to playoff expansion in 1995, the better team is 11-5. (There was one matchup, the 2007 NLCS, in which two division rivals with the same record met.)"