MLB Playoff Picture

Six clubs from each league reach the postseason: the three division winners, then the three best records left over as wild cards. The order matters as much as the membership, because it decides who gets a bye — seeds 1 and 2 skip the Wild Card round entirely.

The seeding rule that surprises people is that every division winner outranks every wild card. A club that wins a weak division on 78 wins is seeded above a wild card with 88, which is why this table is not simply the six best records in each league. It is three division leaders in record order, then the three best records remaining.

"Clinched" comes from whichever source has settled it. Where the exchange has graded that club's playoff-qualifier contract and paid it out, that is the fact — a settled market beats our reading of a record. Otherwise it is the arithmetic: a club whose division is mathematically won, or whose place cannot be taken by anyone left, is in the field whether or not the contract has graded yet, and that gap can run for weeks. "Clinched division" says the stronger of the two — the division itself is decided, so the club is a division winner rather than merely in. A club can clinch a place long before its seed is decided, and one that clinches in August can still slide from a bye to a wild card in the last week.

Records come from the exchange's own standings feed. WCGB, the wild-card order, the cutoff and the magic numbers are computed here from those records across the whole league — none of them are in the feed. WCGB is games behind the last wild-card place rather than behind a division leader, which is the number a postseason page is read for: a club can be well beaten in its own division and still be holding a spot. A club above the line carries its cushion as a plus, and a division leader carries a dash, since it is not in the wild-card race. A magic number is the count of further wins that puts a rival out of reach, and the rival is the club that can still finish with the most wins — the one with the fewest losses rather than the one directly behind, because clubs have played different numbers of games. For a division leader it is drawn from its own division, and for a wild card from the clubs outside the places.