Today, a look at how the inter-division Wild-Card races developed, and also the Race for draft position. Here's Monday's look at the AL, and yesterday's look at the NL.
These graphs show games above or below .500 at the conclusion of each game. So double-headers will show two markers, one above the other. I started each team off at 0 on the day preceding its first game.
American League Wild Card Race:
There was a lot of churning going on in these races up until the very end, with Basically six teams contending for four playoff spots. I also kept the Sox in there (and the Tigers) to show that as late as August 29, not only did the Sox have a lead in the Central division, but they also had the third-best record in the American League as a whole. From that point, they went 13-20 and finished with the eighth-best record in the AL
National League Wild Card Race:
For this graph, since the race for the divisions and the first wild card were settled well in advance of the final week, This is all the other teams that finished close, or were at one point in the leader's spot.
Race for the Best Draft Pick:
All teams in MLB that won fewer than 70 games. With the Y-axis flipped, because why not?
It seems like all of these teams finished hard except for maybe the Twins. (The Twins did make a last-week run to hold off Cleveland, the Marlins, and the BoSox for fourth.
Colors (mostly) match official team colors as they are in Wikipedia.
I made the BoSox color pink to represent the pink hats, and because every last team in both leagues has red and blues and I wanted something else.
I brightened the green for the Athletics so it was a higher contrast.
I guessed at the classic Houston Astros' Navy and Orange, taking them from Atlanta and the Giants, respectively.
I used the Phillies' accent Blue as the color of their pinstripes.
Clearly, Cuddyer's leadership allowed the Rockies to best the Twins.
Almost a second coming of
RocktoberFluketober to pull even with the Cubs for the second pick, but that's a hard pace to maintain and a short winning streak there in the penultimate week clinched that pick for the Northsiders. But a horrid August where they won ten more games than they played really threatened to drop them to the middle of the leagues, perhaps less than a dozen games from .500.If anyone wants a copy of a spreadsheet table with all the teams' colors as RGB codes, let me know. That was a lot of pointless work but I also can't have believe I was the first person to want to have them all in one place, but I gave up on googling after more than half an hour.
If you enjoy it, pointless work can be the best kind of work there is.
I enjoyed it less and less as I got towards the end, but I was close enough to finished that I persisted.