The ELO ratings and regional winners:  Now that 200 regionals in the endless single elimination tournament are under my belt, with 1,600 different teams participating, there is a decent sample to examine whether ELO ratings for the history of MLB can provide any indication of who will win a regional in this crazy single-elimination tournament.  So far, the answer seems to be:  kind of.  As shown in the chart, the modal ELO seeding for the regional winner is indeed the top seed, but that favorite only wins 22.5% of the time, better than the 12.5% we’d see if winners were entirely random but certainly not a sure thing.  If your team is in the top half of entries in the regional, you’re more than twice as likely to win as if you’re in the bottom half, but for some reason #2 seeds just don’t do very well.  However, the squads that fare most poorly are the #7 seeded out of the eight teams–the worst ELO-rated team in these groups wins the regional nearly twice as often as the second-worst.  The #4 seeds have been strangely successful for reasons that elude me; in this tournament, the actual pairings are entirely random rather than being based upon seeding such as is done in, for example, the NCAA basketball tournament.  If the pairings had been based on seedings with #1 always playing #8 in the first round and so forth, things might have gone differently.  However, when I started this tournament in 1980, Arpad Elo had only published his book on his rating system (for chess players) two years previously, so his system wasn’t comprehensively applied to baseball until several years after my first tournament games were played!  A final note:  the source that I’ve relied upon for MLB ELO ratings was bought out by Disney, which resulted in mass layoffs and resignations and as such they discontinued their ELO computations after June 14, 2023.  Unless an alternate source fills this breach, it presents a challenge for seeding any tournament teams for the 2023 season forward, so I had better hurry up and finish playing all 2000+ teams that I currently have before Strat prints any more!