You can view tournament outcomes as partially ordered sets. A team that eliminates another is > that team. This visualization only includes that information. It ignores seeding, except for some influence in the left to right sort.

Normally, we think a team is better because they made it further in the tournament. But what if we only compared teams by which beat which? In that comparison, we know PHI > NYM because PHI > SD > NYM. But, we don’t know that PHI > SEA. There’s no path of elimination between them.

Some things that are a bit easier to see here than a bracket: How many teams each eliminated. It’s just their direct children. Who did the worst, or has the most evidence against them? The bottom line teams don’t look so great. They have lots of evidence against them in terms of losing to teams who lost to other teams. SEA and CLE did as well as each other, except SEA lost to the team that won it all.

It’s certainly a different way of looking at it, and I should have explained it more. I think /r/baseball liked it more because it makes more sense if you have a lot of context. A little bit of context and you probably just think “that’s wrong!”.

It’s not much data, and some would say it isn’t beautiful. But I like simple visualizations that make me see things a different way. If I want upvotes, I should make a Sankey chart of my job search.