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The Houston Astros’ 3-0 victory over the New York Yankees on Tuesday night punched their ticket to an American League Division Series against reigning AL champs the Kansas City Royals. Meanwhile, the Texas Rangers and Toronto Blue Jays have known since the end of the regular season that they would meet in the other ALDS match-up.

Who will prevail in both series? As with our NL and AL Wild Card play-in game write-ups, we simmed each series five times and created a composite of the results to arrive at our prediction. We were helped by a handy option that was added to a special internal build of Out of the Park Baseball 16: a Game Importance dropdown that tells the AI if it should treat the sims as if they’re regular games or do-or-die affairs.


The Game Importance feature will be available to the public in next year’s OOTP 17. Here’s a look at it:
 

This is what we think will likely happen in both series:

Texas Rangers vs. Toronto Blue Jays

 This was an interesting series of sims, with Texas sweeping two of them and Toronto going the full five games to win the other three. Overall, Texas won more games and scored more runs, with the average score of 5.6 – 4.7 in their favor, but we’re giving the edge to Toronto because they won the majority of the series.

We also have a feeling this one has a good shot at going the distance, so we’re nodding in agreement with those five-game sims. Toss out those two sweeps, both of which dragged down Toronto’s high-powered offense, and what’s left looks like a pretty good indicator of what will probably happen in the series.

Here’s the high level breakdown.

Houston Astros vs. Kansas City Royals

This was an interesting batch of sims, to say the least. Houston outscored Kansas City overall, but with Kansas City winning four out of the five simmed series, we’re giving the nod to them. A caveat, though: Between three of those Kansas City wins going the distance and the fact that Houston outscored them, this series could go either way. At the very least, though, we’re very comfortable in predicting another five-game series here.

Here’s the high level breakdown.