It's time for real, live playoff baseball. Or as sabermetricians like to call it: the season where weird stuff happens.
The playoffs are entirely different from the regular season, with an emphasis on top-tier starting pitching and the savvy usage of strong late-inning relief. Sabermetrics researchers have struggled in vain for years to pinpoint a secret sauce that can guarantee postseason success. Because of the changing strategies and wild-card structures in MLB, trying to figure out who's going to win the World Series creates problems that are similar to those faced by electoral prognosticators, only with much less data.1 The truth may be that there is no very accurate way to forecast who will survive the gantlet of the MLB playoffs.