Did the Best Team Win? Analysis of the 2010 Major League Baseball Postseason Using Monte Carlo Simulation

The San Francisco Giants were crowned champions of Major League Baseball in 2010 after defeating the Texas Rangers in the World Series. The World Series matchup may have come as a surprise to many baseball fanatics; the Rangers ended the regular season with the worst record of any of the eight playoff teams, and the Giants ended with the fourth worst. Did these two teams simply catch fire at the right time? Or were they better than their regular season records showed? To answer these questions, the regular season statistics of individual players on each team were used to simulate the postseason. These simulations determined the probability with which each playoff team could have been expected to win the 2010 World Series.