Expect the unexpected: Which M...

Opening Day has passed, and all of MLB's teams are in the middle of their second series, putting the order of summer predictions and forecasts into touch with the pandemonium of reality. It can be difficult to get past the icy surety of who was good last year and who has been good the past several years in an age when the Houston Astros, Los Angeles Dodgers, or Atlanta Braves have appeared in every World Series since 2017.

Their supremacy is such that, despite spending nearly a billion dollars on players, the Philadelphia Phillies and San Diego Padres were considered surprise postseason teams in the highly stratified National League in 2022.  When the baseball staff at Yahoo Sports projected the postseason field for this season previous to Opening Day, four out of five anticipated the same six NL teams that made it there last year. We went chalk, in the language of March's other favored prediction activity.

But in baseball, like this year's March Madness, a year without a surprise has traditionally been the greatest surprise of all. Since the inclusion of the second wild card in 2012, 47.6% of postseason teams have skipped the playoffs the prior season (excluding 2020 and 2021 due to the anomalous field in 2020). And 21.7% of playoff clubs had a losing record the year before.

There has yet to be a tournament in the wild-card period without at least one team coming off a losing season and at least three teams missing the playoffs the previous year.

Last year, when each league had three wild cards, a full half of the playoff participants were coming off home Octobers, and three teams made it after ending under.500 in 2021. Not to frighten already frightened Philadelphia Phillies supporters, but the point is that some favored teams will fall off, and some new teams will emerge to claim postseason tickets. Consider who might be heading in which way on baseball's unpredictability lift.