This is part 2 of my attempt to fill in the 1994 season. Part 1, where I talk about the backstory of the 1994 strike, is here.

On that fateful 12^th of August, 1994, baseball ground to a halt. Jump down for a look at the Pythagorean-based end-of-season records and what the playoff picture would've been had they finished out the year.

It's rather fun to look back on this from a 2009 perspective, where the idea of Cincinnati leading the NL Central, Baltimore being in 2^nd in the East, and Montreal, well, existing is just silly to us. But, hey, things change and such was life way back in 1994.

Now that I'm done feeling old, let's start to dive into this thing. First of all, let's spotlight a few things from these divisional races. Starting with the good, check out the NL East, NL Central, AL East, and AL Central. The Expos, Braves, Reds, Astros, Yankees, Orioles, White Sox, Indians, and Royals (!) were all submitting outstanding seasons. Of course, as I mentioned earlier, the Expos have served as the martyr of this lost season; their story has been well-documented. But the overall quality of some of these divisional races match anything we've seen since. Well, as long as you don't bring up the western divisions.

Indeed, if there's one reason to be grateful for the strike – and even this is a reach, at best – it's that the AL West race was so mind-bendingly awful that it did not deserve to lead to a champion making the playoffs. I mean, seriously – California (now Los Angeles...of Anaheim, if you're not up on your history) had the worst record in the league, and they were only 5 games out of first place. This is especially pathetic when you consider that teams like Houston, Cleveland, Baltimore and Kansas City who were vying for playoff spots actually deserved their bids, and yet few if any would be so privileged as the winner of the execrable AL West to make the playoffs. And while the NL West was at least respectable, I would liken them to the NL Central of 2006, which the Cardinals won with an 83-78 record. And please to forget that those Cardinals won the World Series that year.

Anyway, the point is that the strike brought a premature end not only to the remarkable individual seasons I highlighted earlier, but some very notable divisional races. So the first step in this project of filling in the '94 season is to project how these teams would have finished out the year. To do so, I calculated each team's Pythagorean Record, which is a measure of how the teams are expected to perform based on their runs scored and runs allowed. The actual formula I used is (runs scored ^ 1.81)/((runs scored ^1.81) + (runs allowed ^ 1.81)). This gave me their expected winning percentage, which I then multiplied by 162 to project each team's record after a full season. Given that, here's how the standings would have looked at the end of the season:

So what changes do we see? Well, the only one of note is that Oakland stormed back, playing some “excellent” baseball down the stretch to take the AL West crown. Other than that, the division winners stayed constant, as did the second place teams with a chance to win the Wild Card. Also, the Cubs started playing better, leapfrogging St. Louis and Pittsburgh on their way out of the NL Central cellar, similar to the way that Milwaukee and Detroit avoided last-place finishes.

In terms of the playoff picture, nothing changed from the way it looked on August 12. This was the first year where MLB used the modern playoff structure, including the Wild Card. So, all the playoff matchups would be as follows:

ALDS

Oakland Athletics (AL West Champs) vs. Chicago White Sox (AL Central Champs)

Cleveland Indians (Wild Card) vs. New York Yankees (AL East Champs)

NLDS

Los Angeles Dodgers (NL West Champs) vs. Montreal Expos (NL East Champs)

Atlanta Braves (Wild Card) vs. Cincinnati Reds (NL Central Champs)

Here's some numbers on the playoff teams, as calculated by what they'd done as of August 12^th. I measured their performance using wOBA (weighted on-base average; scaled like OBP but gives more weight to power hitting), QERA (defense-independent measure of pitching ability; scaled like regular ERA), Secret Sauce (Baseball Prospectus' indicator of playoff success; the lower the better), and Run Differential (runs scored minus runs allowed; negative means the team was outscored). All ranks are out of 28 teams.

Ladies and gentlemen, your 1994 World Series contenders! Well, except for Oakland. They don't really deserve to contend. But, hey, I'm not going to exclude them from the next part of this series, where I delve a bit more in-depth into these squads, examining their notable players, how they got here, and chances for advancing to this World Series I'm crafting. You know, for whatever that's worth.

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