[Det42]

I just got OOTP 17 last week and was immediately hit with an idea, which I shared on the forums of a league that I'm in. Shortly afterward, someone suggested I should think about sharing it here. I tell you all that so you know why I'm already a good distance into the first round of my tournament before I even posted here...

Also, I had already gotten a few series in before someone asked for screenshots (I have no idea why I hadn't thought of that), so some of the early ones don't have any. Sorry about that.

Anyway, here's what I'm doing: I'm taking all 111 World Series champions and putting them in a tournament to see who really is the best. If you're at all interested how I determined their starting points, my ranking system was mostly arbitrary. I used regular season winning percentage as the #1 factor; the better they did in the regular season, the better the rank. The first tie breaker was number of losses in that year's World Series. Potentially tough for the few teams that played best-of-nine, but I couldn't think of anything else at the time. Especially considering the second tie breaker is a random number generator. The higher ranked team gets home field AND strategy set up in their year. If the higher ranked team is one of the teams that won a best-of-nine World Series, the series will be best-of-nine, otherwise it will be best-of-seven.

I had considered doing "play-in" series based on the league champions of 1904 and the final standings and playoff format of 1994, but I decided against it. Since this is about World Series champions, it didn't feel right to include teams that didn't win one.

Since there are fewer than 128 teams, the following teams got first round byes (listed from #1-17 ranking)
1909 Pirates
1927 Yankees
1907 Cubs
1998 Yankees
1939 Yankees
1932 Yankees
1929 A's
1912 Red Sox
1942 Cardinals
1905 Giants
1919 Reds
1944 Cardinals
1910 A's
1961 Yankees
1915 Red Sox
1911 A's
1970 Orioles

I've attached a file showing the bracket at the start of the tournament.