You dont want the best record...

since I didn't look at the second or 3rd or 4th best record and see how many they won..which would be interesting...the point is if you have the best record and home field advantage your chances of a ring are still 1 in 4

I am rarely the best record in the regular season, usually I am lucky to sneak in to the playoffs, but when I make it I win championships at 35%. I think I am near 50% if I have the best record. Which is a miracle if it happens.

You do also get a small advantage with the best record just with a .10 batting average boost from home games (and you get one more) I'm not sure I buy the argument that it should be 25% because of a short series. Better teams...are better teams. But it may be that a team with a better record is not actually the best team (different match-ups/schedules), the best team doesn't match-up well with one or more teams in the play-offs, the best team does better against poor teams but ain't that great against better teams, the team with the best record has only a marginally better record than other play-offs teams, etc. But you might expect that these kinds of things would kind of cancel each other out with enough iterations

The real issue is that 30 leagues are still a very small sample size. If you get that same result for thousands of leagues that would be different.

freeman--that is just a reasonable benchmark based on pure chance, in the same way that a 33% playoff rate is a reasonable benchmark in a 12 team league, ie 4 teams of 12 make it. Nothing to buy--just a comparative fact.

In the same way, of 4 playoff teams, 1 in 4 would make it--25%--if left to pure chance.
So for 30 teams, if the best record team won 8 times, they outperformed pure chance--27% to 25% if we are picky, though that implies precision that doesn't exist.

The point is--the example given still beat expectation of pure chance so it is a moot point.

Else what is the expectation? Best record is an auto-win? 90%? 70%? it is nonsense, especially when considering that best record was typically against teams that were very weak, yadda yadda as outlined below.

Point well taken. I don't know what would be the reasonable expectation for how often the team with the best record would win if you looked at an infinite number of leagues. I guess my inclination would be more than 25% but 27% might be reasonable. To me, it would just be complete speculation.

Clearly, even if you were to "guess" the number is higher than 27% it's certainly not high enough above 27% in reality that a 27% result would be surprising in 30 leagues. So this data is not meaningful IMHO.

I can agree with all of that certainly, especially because I wasn't trying to pick a squabble with you but may have sounded that way.

I know you're a reasonable guy who makes good points. I thought I might have actually stepped on your toes a bit and you were just defending your position. No worries! I like to see what you have to say.

Oh I didn't feel that way at all. Just a rough week.
Likewise on being reasonable and seeing what one has to say