Late last year I wrote a piece that argued that if our major sports leagues wanted to solve the problem of fading interest in their regular seasons, they should kill the playoffs.
It wasn’t exactly a realistic proposal: the leagues have far too much invested in the glory of their playoffs to undo them. But, still: what if the regular-season games actually mattered for something more than just playoff seeding? It’s an intriguing thought.
Major League Baseball, it seems, is now considering going in precisely the opposite direction, having floated the idea of expanding its playoffs. I suppose I should take some pride in this. At this point in time, there is a measure of vindication in holding the contrary view to MLB commissioner Rob Manfred on just about anything. He tried to whitewash a cheating scandal in a way that no one is buying, he does not understand why or how his baseballs suddenly started flying further, and he watched as a rich team traded away a generational superstar to another rich team under the guise of fiscal prudence. The games take too long, and it hasn’t attracted young viewers, which it has combatted by ensuring that World Series games start very late. If Manfred says X, you can feel pretty good about having your money on Y.
The commissioner has been blasted in recent days for having used the playoff-expansion trial balloon as an attempt to distract from the legitimate concerns about the cheating scandal. It’s a fair point: spring training is getting underway, and the Houston Astros are already doing their level best to sound not the least bit contrite about their unsavoury tactics. At some point the commissioner will release the results of the investigation into the Boston Red Sox’ cheating scandal, and we will debate how much of a taint there is on two of the last three World Series championships. But, hey, more playoffs! (Dangles bauble in front of eyes.) So sparkly!
As shameless as the playoff-expansion idea is as a distraction tactic, it deserves to be ridiculed on its own merits.
Baseball, more than the other North American leagues, used to have a regular season that mattered. A team won each of the American and National leagues, and they met in the World Series. Two playoff teams became four as the sport expanded, but a team still had to prove itself over the long slog of a 162-game schedule to get into the postseason. Divisional realignment and the addition of the wild-card team in each league doubled the playoff field after the 1994 World Series was cancelled – single tear for the Montreal Expos – and this had the effect of giving many smaller-market teams at least the occasional shot at the playoffs. I can’t be a total purist on this: if MLB still had four divisions and four playoff teams, it feels like the big-market franchises on either coast would have been mostly trading the World Series among them for the past 25 years.
But things started to go off the rails when baseball added the second wild card for the 2012 season. Brought in to deepen the field of playoff contenders and give more teams, and their fans, something to care about late in the season, it also created a system where very good teams proved themselves won consistently over six months and then were rewarded with a single postseason game. Having a 162-game season ride on one subsequent game is like an NFL team, after 16 games, having its fate determined by a 10-minute playoff. The cautionary tale here is the Pittsburgh Pirates, a small-market team that did all the things such a franchise is supposed to do – stink for a long while, and develop prospects – to become competitive, and ended up with three straight wild-card appearances from 2013-15. So, three straight coin flips. They won the first one and lost the next two, and it turned out that the championship window was only ever barely open a crack.
Instead of more teams being lured into a playoff chase, the opposite has happened, with more franchises opting for painful rebuilds rather than chasing the mirage of a postseason run that could end in about three hours, depending on the number of pitching changes.
The new proposal, then, would fix a problem of baseball’s own making by killing the one-game playoff. Instead, two more wild cards in each league, and a 12-team first round, with the top team in each league getting a bye to the second round. More teams would remain in playoff contention as the season wore on, which would in turn mean more middling teams given the chance to make hay in a short series. Last season, the 85-win Arizona Diamondbacks and 84-win Boston Red Sox would have made the playoffs. Boston would have done so with a 79-83 record, so bad was the rest of the American League. More teams would end up jockeying for those extra wild cards, but the better teams would have playoff positions all but locked up by early September. All that would be left to figure out would be the seeding.
And, in its quest to add more “important” games to the calendar, MLB would dramatically reduce the amount of games that actually feel like they mean something important.
The way this league is presently being run, that feels about right.
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