I explain it easily: the Jets were BETTER than the Colts. The people who thought the NFL was way better than the AFL were just plain wrong!
hehheh, you got me there. I cede that point.
The MLB record for a winning streak is 26 by the 1916 NY Giants, who finished in fourth place that season. And they won all the games at home. And they had a tie in the middle of it, but MLB throws those out for this sort of record.
Oakland won 20 straight in 2002.
Tampa Bay has the longest streak this season at 12.
Okay, I expected the streaks to be much longer. I stand corrected, and I retract my argument.
I suppose the reality is that because a single MLB game is so monumentally meaningless, good teams can be expected to sandbag more often than in the NFL, where virtually every game is pivotal.
So my answer to the OP is this: Good teams just don’t care about any one game, so the scrubs (who have something to prove) can step it up and beat them. That’s why you see more underdog wins in baseball.
I think the wild card in baseball games is the pitcher. A really bad team, like Arizona, can have a really good starting pitcher, like Randy Johnson, so it’s possible that they can get a really good outing from their pitcher to overcome their crappiness.
In football, the wild card tends to be turnovers. A very good team will usually only get upset if they turn over the ball a disproportionate amount. But good teams are usually coached well enough to avoid that.