Talk:1981 in baseball

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Could there be some explanation as to why the strike split the season into two halves like that? It's a rather odd situation, where in the National League, the overall best team in each division (the Cardinals and the Reds) didn't manage to make it to the playoffs at all, and where neither team in the World Series was the best in its division, and the Yankees were in fact third in their division. Why didn't they just have the teams with the best overall record in each division play in a league championship series as normal?