How magic & tragic work
Magic is the clinch countdown. In the classic form used here: take the focus club’s remaining games, add one, then subtract how many more losses the chase club already has than you. When that number hits zero, you’re in — barring pathological tiebreaker edge cases we flag but don’t fully re-sort.
Tragic is the mirror for teams outside the last qualifying slot: how close you are to mathematical elimination. You want your magic to land before tragic does.
ClinchDesk bakes a morning PT snapshot so the board is bookmarkable and shareable. Flip W/L in the planner to ask “what if we take two of three?” without waiting on a live ticker.
FAQ
Is this an official MLB feed?
No. It’s an educational race desk frozen from public magic-number and standings pages cited below. Refresh by reloading after we ship an updated bake.
Why don’t opponent results auto-flip?
Each board owns one focus club’s scenario toggles. Open a second board (or share URL) for the chase club if you want their flips in parallel.
Where do favorites live?
Named boards save to localStorage key clinchdesk.boards.v1. Share URLs encode the same state in the hash so a teammate can open the same desk.
Dodgers already clinched — why are they here?
October readiness. Ohtani’s expected return sits next to a clinched NL West club so you can still scenario the final week without pretending they’re chasing a wild card.
Methodology
Primary bake: Sports Magic Numbers wild-card board (W-L, magic, tragic, slot). Cross-check: Yahoo MLB playoff tracker remaining series and clinch notes; MLB.com wild-card layout for structure. Magic formula: G_remaining_us + 1 − (L_them − L_us) against the relevant chase club (division runner-up or last wild-card seat). Scenario wins/losses adjust the focus club’s W-L and remaining before recomputing.
