It’s one of the surest annual calls in baseball, as reliable to count on as no pitcher throwing 240 innings. It’s the Law of the Surprise Playoff Team: Every playoff field will include at least one team—usually more—that had a losing record the previous season.
I’ve been tracking this law since 2014, which was so long ago that Johnny Cueto and David Price each topped 240 innings. Nobody has done it since. (There were 15 such workhorses in 1992.) Likewise, the Law of the SPT never disappoints—and it goes even farther back than the disappearance of the workhorse starter. The evidence is solid:
