Baseball punishes any site that treats it like the other sports. On paper the season is 2,430 games, so these pages are organized by month and night rather than by round. The 2026 count is 2,429: MLB.com reported that the Orioles-Yankees finale on September 27 was canceled because of the weather and would not be rescheduled.
A 162-game season, seven months at a time
The MLB schedule runs from March to September, and every month has its own page, such as June. A bar shows the month's games and nights, and while games remain the page opens on the month with the next unplayed game and tags it Next up. Each night lists its games with the first-pitch time in US Eastern and the ballpark. Eastern time applies wherever the game is played, so a West Coast night game appears three hours after its local start. Finished games show Final and the score.
Above the calendar sits a season snapshot: games played and left, the date of the next game and the share of the year done. The 2026 schedule has each club play 13 games against each division rival, six or seven against each of the other ten teams in its league and 48 interleague games, including a six-game series against a designated rival.
How a club gets to October
Twelve clubs reach the postseason, six from each league: the three division winners and the three other clubs with the best records. Division winners are seeded 1 to 3 and wild cards 4 to 6, each group by record, and the two best division winners skip the first round. The other four clubs play a best-of-three Wild Card Series, third seed against sixth and fourth against fifth, with the higher seed hosting all three games. The Division Series are best-of-five, the League Championship Series and World Series best-of-seven. The bracket is fixed, with no reseeding: the top seed meets the winner of 4 versus 5 and the second seed the winner of 3 versus 6. The better regular-season record gets World Series home field.
A tie in the standings is not played off: with the field at twelve since 2022, there is no Game 163. MLB's rules start with the head-to-head record, then the record within the division, then against the whole league, then league games after the All-Star break. Our posts on the first-round bye and on wild-card champions show what the seeds have been worth.
Finishing the season in the simulator
The MLB simulator starts with every finished game locked. Choose a month, then a night, and type a score into any open game. The American League and National League tables rebuild as you type, with wins, losses and winning percentage, and the first six places in each league carry the Playoffs marker. Simulate night draws the open games on the night on screen, Simulate season draws all of them and replaces anything you typed, and Clear restores the real standings. After the last regular-season game, both tables simply show the real records.
To draw a score, the model rates each club by its 2025 run differential per game. The expected margin is the difference between two clubs' ratings plus a home edge of only 0.05 runs. Randomness does the rest: single-game margins swing by more than four runs around the expectation on a game total of about 8.8 runs, so a club that was a full run better per game last year is still beaten often. Run the season several times rather than once: a club that makes the playoff places in nearly every run is in a strong position, and one that keeps flipping in and out is on the edge. Run differential and wins explains why that rating is a good place to start.
Why the playoff line is only a guide
Each table is one ranking per league by winning percentage. While games remain, the simulator lists the three division winners first and the three wild cards after them, as MLB seeds its postseason; with the 2026 season over, it keeps the final order and marks the six clubs per league that played in October. The 2026 American League shows why seeding is not the same as record: Houston, which won the AL West at 81-81, was the third seed, while the Yankees, at 93-68, were the fourth as a wild card. Clubs level on winning percentage are ordered by wins and then run differential, not by MLB's tiebreakers, so read the line as a guide to the race.
The playoff bracket page
The MLB playoff bracket follows the postseason series by series. It draws the American League and National League as two halves, with a column per round: Wild Card Series (Best of 3), Division Series (Best of 5) and Championship Series (Best of 7). The World Series sits below them and has its own link, /mlb/playoffs#world-series.
Each series is a small card with the two clubs, their official seeds from 1 to 6, the games each has won and one status line: who won and by what series score, who leads, or the number, day and start time in US Eastern of the next game. Below the bracket, Playoff schedule and results lists every game by month and night with ballparks and final scores. Games still to come carry a round-and-game tag such as ALDS · G2 or WS · G1, games played only if a series runs long are marked If necessary, and a decided series drops its unplayed games.
More on the numbers
- MLB schedule, MLB simulator and MLB playoff bracket: the three pages this guide describes.
- How the models are built: the constants behind every simulator on the site.
Free, no sign-up, nothing saved. Rules checked on November 3, 2026 against MLB.com's tiebreaker rules and Wikipedia's pages on the MLB postseason and the 2026 season.