The following comment was posted by a veteran participant on the Out of the Park Baseball (OOTP) Forum in response to another person who lamented having lost World Series more than once with 100 plus win teams but won with only 86 wins.
This really puts into perspective the whole issue of winning and losing in short playoff series:
Posted by The Wolf:
The playoffs are a crapshoot.
A quote from The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow):
...if one team is good enough to warrant beating another in 55% of its games, the weaker team will nevertheless win a 7-game series about 4 times out of 10. And if the superior team could beat its opponent, on average, 2 out of 3 times they meet, the inferior team will still win a 7-game series about once every 5 match-ups. There is really no way for a sports league to change this. In the lopsided 2/3-probability case, for example, you’d have to play a series consisting of at minimum the best of 23 games to determine the winner with what is called statistical significance, meaning the weaker team would be crowned champion 5 percent or less of the time. And in the case of one team’s having only a 55-45 edge, the shortest significant “world series” would be the best of 269 games, a tedious endeavor indeed! So sports playoff series can be fun and exciting, but being crowned “world champion” is not a reliable indication that a team is actually the best one. (p. 70-71)
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