baseball history goes back over 100 years and there are many races every year, especially with divisional play and wild card added in. plus those probabilities aren't really THAT unlikely - a team with a 98% chance to make the playoffs will blow it, on average, 1 in 50 times. how many times in baseball history has a team had a 98% chance of making the playoffs? probably happens every year. "Statistically, the 1995 Angels shouldn't have even happened once in MLB history" is a complete misunderstanding of probability theory. Shouldn't is a bad word choice but you would not expect a team with a 99.988% chance of making the playoffs to have ever missed the playoffs based on how many seasons there have been in baseball. There were only 2 races a year until 1969, 4 from 1969-1995, and 8 since 1995. The odds of hitting a 8300+ to 1 shot in that period is still pretty small. And then you factor in all the other collapses, I'm skeptical that the model holds up very well when you're talking about late season collapses. I'm guessing there are some psychological/panic factors that kick in once you're blowing the season and the model doesn't capture that very well.