Multi-Tiered Playoffs and Their Impact on Professional Baseball

Abstract This article investigates multitiered playoffs in professional baseball. It is shown that although increasing the length of any playoff series decreases the probability of an upset, the introduction of a multitiered playoff system impacts the probability of an upset to the extent that upsets become highly probable. It is also shown that, given a fixed number of games within which to conduct multitiered playoffs, an allocation rule may be determined so that the distribution of games to each tier may be set in order to maximize the probability that the team with the highest winning percentage advances through all tiers successfully.