By John Stryker

Let me first say, anything in this article should be taken with a grain of salt. Maybe even a 50 pound bag of salt. Still, it is at a minimum amusing, and perhaps informative.

My methodology was to automatically generate CMs for every team and change a couple of league settings to make sure that usage would be watched and some of the extended roster would be used – although HAL made some weird decisions on that. I ran one season to check for reasonableness and noticed that all CMs were 25 man, 15 hitters and 10 pitchers. I went and added two pitchers to each team, generally the best or most useful but I chose quickly rather than deliberated. Then I ran 25 simulations. For each I saved off the standings page and amused myself by spending one or two minutes perusing the stats before restarting and running again. This took many hours over a few days.

I then compiled the charts below. For the National Conference, all that I tracked was “Best Record” which grants automatic promotion and entrance into the main playoff, and “Next Four” which gains placement into the play-in tournament for the other promotion and playoff slot. Since I consider the play-in to be “real postseason” both numbers are summed as well. In the event of ties I did not do any sort of tiebreaking procedure – I recorded each as one-half or one-third, as applicable.

Here is the National Conference:

This proved interesting for a number of reasons. For one, I’ve done this sort of thing many times for many leagues, and usually there is much greater variation than we see here. Ancaster and Tuscany stand way above the rest of the field, both appearing to be locks for the postseason and between them hogging over 90% of the direct tickets to the playoffs. Space City and San Francisco seem like solid postseason bets as well, with Wausau and Norfolk also being slightly better than a coin flip. Montana and Galesburg appear to have prayers, while the other four teams play Washington Generals to the rest of the Globetrotters in the league. For most of them, this was by design.

Now, for the Premier Conference:

Here we see some of the variance that I’ve grown accustomed to, but there remain some favorites. I tracked “Best Division Winner”, “Second Division Winner”, and “Next Four” since those are the six playoff spots. I also tracked “Relegation” as two teams will sadly make their exit for the National after this season. It appears that the Mays is stronger than the Williams, just from all teams having solid playoff chances and relegation being rare. Note the tightness in win totals in the bottom three, even four, teams in the Mays. As for my own Wheeling Screamers, the interesting note is that will I have a solid chance at the postseason I did not win the division in any of the 25 simulations – although I did in my test run earlier!

I encourage everyone to run their own simulations – don’t trust my runs. After all, I don’t!