Expanded Playoffs Discourage Greatness
To paraphrase the late, great Chris Wallace, if it ain’t one thing, it’s another freaking other. After MLB announced its bubble-esque postseason format, Rob Manfred slipped in the claim that expanded playoffs are likely here to stay.
Manfred, as he is wont to do, conflated what the owners — his bosses — desire with what has actually been decided; expanded playoffs would require an agreement between the league and the MLBPA. Even though Manfred’s declaration is merely media signaling, though, it’s worth discussing its potential effect on baseball’s competitive landscape, because it would be absolutely earth-shattering.
While the commissioner didn’t elaborate on what type of expanded playoffs he was talking about, it’s fair to assume that they might take the form of this year’s tournament — eight teams in each league qualify, with best-of-three series at the higher seeds’ home parks to cut the field in half — though they could also feature a 14-team field, a possibility reported by Joel Sherman in February. I’ll assume a 16-team field here, as I think the extra television revenue will prove awfully enticing. From there, there would be the normal five-seven-seven structure we’ve grown accustomed to.
In an abbreviated season, expanded playoffs make some sense. 60 games isn’t enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, so a postseason cutoff was always going to feel arbitrary. Sixteen, eight, 10 — none would feel normal, because this season isn’t normal. Given that, creating more of a tournament atmosphere via short series feels like a fun one-off plan.
If every possible 2020 playoff format is going to feel equally valid, the owners have an obvious reason to expand the postseason: money. Owners take in the vast majority of playoff revenue — players get a share of the gate receipts in the first three (in the case of the Division Series) or four (League Championship and World Series) games of each round, while the owners get the rest of the gate as well the television money, which overshadows revenue from ticket sales. More games means more games to sell to TV networks. Ask a group of businesspeople if they’d like some extra money at almost no cost, and well, they probably won’t say no.
But in a full baseball season, a 16-game playoff does something else entirely. One of the neat features of a 162-game season is that it does an excellent job of determining which teams are best. On a given day, anyone can beat anyone. In the broad sweep of time, however, five percent edges add up. That doesn’t mean the 10 best teams always make the playoffs, but it does mean that you can be fairly certain the top team in each league is better than the sixth-best team.
From there, the postseason is still a random event. The Astros and Dodgers had the two best records in baseball last year, and the Nationals outlasted both of them. The point of a cutoff, then, is to limit the postseason to good teams. Anyone can win once there, but the smallest playoff field (by number of teams) of the major North American sports, combined with the long season, mostly keeps the riff-raff out.
In a 16-team format, the Astros and Dodgers would still be top seeds. They’d be only three games away from elimination right from the start, however, just like the other 14 teams in the postseason. Everyone who’s watched midseason baseball knows that bad teams sometimes beat good teams in three-game series. That’s simply the cost of doing business in a random game.
To get an idea of what that would do to each team’s odds of winning the World Series, I did some approximating. I took the top eight teams in each league and mixed together winning percentages, mean reversion, and odds ratios to come up with some (very) rough World Series odds. Going into last year’s playoffs, that looked like this:
| Team | Win Pct | WS Odds |
|---|---|---|
| Astros | .660 | 16.9% |
| Yankees | .636 | 13.8% |
| Twins | .623 | 12.4% |
| A’s | .599 | 5.1% |
| Rays | .593 | 4.8% |
| Indians | .574 | 0.0% |
| Red Sox | .519 | 0.0% |
| Rangers | .481 | 0.0% |
| Dodgers | .654 | 17.9% |
| Braves | .599 | 12.0% |
| Cardinals | .562 | 8.7% |
| Nationals | .574 | 4.7% |
| Brewers | .549 | 3.6% |
| Mets | .531 | 0.0% |
| Diamondbacks | .525 | 0.0% |
| Cubs | .519 | 0.0% |
Then I did the same thing using the new playoff format: top eight teams, mean reversion, odds ratio — throw them all in a pot, and you get some World Series odds:
| Team | Win Pct | WS Odds |
|---|---|---|
| Astros | .660 | 12.6% |
| Yankees | .636 | 9.8% |
| Twins | .623 | 8.2% |
| A’s | .599 | 6.5% |
| Rays | .593 | 6.1% |
| Indians | .574 | 5.0% |
| Red Sox | .519 | 2.9% |
| Rangers | .481 | 1.9% |
| Dodgers | .654 | 12.4% |
| Braves | .599 | 7.9% |
| Cardinals | .562 | 5.6% |
| Nationals | .574 | 5.9% |
| Brewers | .549 | 4.5% |
| Mets | .531 | 4.0% |
| Diamondbacks | .525 | 3.7% |
| Cubs | .519 | 3.1% |
The new structure is flatter by far. Take a look at the odds changes by team:
| Team | Win Pct | Old Odds | New Odds | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Astros | .660 | 16.9% | 12.6% | -4.3% |
| Yankees | .636 | 13.8% | 9.8% | -4.0% |
| Twins | .623 | 12.4% | 8.2% | -4.1% |
| A’s | .599 | 5.1% | 6.5% | 1.4% |
| Rays | .593 | 4.8% | 6.1% | 1.3% |
| Indians | .574 | 0.0% | 5.0% | 5.0% |
| Red Sox | .519 | 0.0% | 2.9% | 2.9% |
| Rangers | .481 | 0.0% | 1.9% | 1.9% |
| Dodgers | .654 | 17.9% | 12.4% | -5.5% |
| Braves | .599 | 12.0% | 7.9% | -4.1% |
| Cardinals | .562 | 8.7% | 5.6% | -3.2% |
| Nationals | .574 | 4.7% | 5.9% | 1.1% |
| Brewers | .549 | 3.6% | 4.5% | 0.9% |
| Mets | .531 | 0.0% | 4.0% | 4.0% |
| Diamondbacks | .525 | 0.0% | 3.7% | 3.7% |
| Cubs | .519 | 0.0% | 3.1% | 3.1% |
Win your division? You’re hurt by the new format. Wild Card team? You have slightly better odds, because sometimes you’re lucky and the eight seed knocks off the one seed before you have to play them. Mediocre? Join the World Series party!
The main benefit of my loose approximation of World Series odds is that it generalizes well. I used the same method to run World Series odds under both scenarios for every team going back to 2012, the first year of the current playoff format. Here, for example, is 2018:
| Team | Win Pct | Old Odds | New Odds | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Red Sox | .667 | 19.2% | 12.8% | -6.3% |
| Astros | .636 | 16.2% | 10.7% | -5.5% |
| Indians | .562 | 8.7% | 5.9% | -2.8% |
| Yankees | .617 | 6.5% | 7.8% | 1.3% |
| Athletics | .599 | 5.4% | 6.5% | 1.1% |
| Twins | .481 | 0.0% | 2.5% | 2.5% |
| Rays | .556 | 0.0% | 4.8% | 4.8% |
| Mariners | .549 | 0.0% | 3.9% | 3.9% |
| Brewers | .589 | 12.6% | 8.0% | -4.7% |
| Dodgers | .564 | 10.7% | 6.6% | -4.1% |
| Braves | .556 | 10.0% | 5.9% | -4.1% |
| Cubs | .583 | 6.2% | 7.1% | 1.0% |
| Rockies | .558 | 4.7% | 5.5% | 0.8% |
| Cardinals | .543 | 0.0% | 5.1% | 5.1% |
| Diamondbacks | .506 | 0.0% | 3.6% | 3.6% |
| Nationals | .506 | 0.0% | 3.4% | 3.4% |
There are some seeding vagaries to handle. In 2015 and 2017, for example, both Wild Card teams came from the same division in the National League. The same was true in the AL in 2016. After accounting for that, however, here are the aggregate World Series odds for each finishing spot:
| Seed | Avg. Wins | Avg. WS Odds Old | Avg. WS Odds New | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Div Winner 1 | 99.8 | 15.8% | 10.5% | -5.3% |
| Div Winner 2 | 96.3 | 13.4% | 8.7% | -4.7% |
| Div Winner 3 | 91.7 | 10.6% | 6.7% | -3.9% |
| WC1 | 92.5 | 5.5% | 6.6% | 1.1% |
| WC2 | 90.1 | 4.8% | 5.7% | 0.9% |
| WC3 | 85.1 | 0.0% | 4.4% | 4.4% |
| WC4 | 84.2 | 0.0% | 4.1% | 4.1% |
| WC5 | 81.7 | 0.0% | 3.4% | 3.4% |
The “Division Winner” lines are self-explanatory. The Wild Card slots, on the other hand, require slightly more explanation. They refer to the top five teams, in record order, who didn’t win their divisions. In 2017, for example, the Rockies won 87 games and finished third in the NL West on their way to capturing the second Wild Card. They count as a “WC2” team here, even though in the new playoff format they’d be the seventh seed.
In a broad sense, the new format penalizes building a great team. The marginal gain from going from the 5-8 seed range — 82-85 wins — to the 3-5 range — 90-92 wins — is tiny. Those 7.5 wins are worth roughly 2% of a World Series trophy. Going from 90-92 wins to the top two seeds — 96-100 wins — adds roughly another 3% of that hunk of metal.
That’s a stark difference from the current format. The 82-85 win range is worth roughly 0% of a World Series championship right now. Move your team into the 90-92 win range, and you add a whopping 7% of a trophy. Go the extra mile and reach the 96-100 area, and that’s another 7.5%. Getting out of the muck is hugely valuable now. It will become less so in the new format.
There’s a countervailing effect that you can’t see here — going from 75 wins to 85 wins is now worth more. It’s worth asking, however, how much teams value a 5% chance of winning the whole shebang. Teams have a chance to do that most years with an aggressive offseason of spending or acquisitions, and they mostly don’t. The emphasis, instead, tends to be on either hunting for bargains or team control. That’s not to say that the occasional team doesn’t take a shot at it, but even then, they mostly attempt to do so in the context of a sustainable, low-cost team.
I’m veering into speculative territory here, but it seems likely to me that this would scuttle the free agency market in relatively short order. The value of mid-tier free agents has already collapsed. Star players have, thus far, avoided this fall, because they mostly don’t have clean substitutes. Teams have gotten increasingly good at developing cost-controlled 1-2 WAR players. Why sign an average free agent when you can make 95% of one out of bubble gum and a minimum contract?
You can’t do that with stars, and a team full of average players is by definition average. To push from the low 80s to the mid 90s, you need to either find a controllable star in the draft or international free agency, trade for one as a prospect, or pay up for one in free agency. Why do the likes of Anthony Rendon, Stephen Strasburg, and Mookie Betts command nine-figure contracts? Because teams interested in living at the top of the table need to jam 5 WAR into a single roster spot to achieve win totals in that stratosphere, and they simply can’t create enough 5 WAR players without free agency.
If you’re going to aim for the mid 80s instead of the mid 90s, though, there’s no need to take your average team and add Mookie Betts. You could argue that the teams who will now hunt stars will be the teams in the 75-80 win range, but those teams, by definition, have more holes than the teams that are currently signing top free agents. If Mookie is worth five otherwise unavailable wins to the Dodgers (by upgrading a 2 WAR spot to a 7 WAR spot), he might be worth seven wins to a 75-win team. Unlike the Dodgers, however, that team would have other ways of getting those seven wins. They could make 1-WAR upgrades seven times, five 1.5-WAR upgrades, or some other combination. Again, they’re a 75-win team; it won’t be hard to find holes that could be upgraded through average players, and average players are far more plentiful than demigods.
Some teams might still be willing to live in the stratosphere. It’s inarguable, however, that this structure reduces the incentives to be great. So long as it’s easier to move from bad to mediocre than from mediocre to great, that will exert inexorable downward pressure on the price of labor in baseball.
Maybe this isn’t how you think about the game. To you, the reward for an AL Central crown might be the crown itself. The players and coaching staff probably agree with you — they’ll be out there trying to win just as much as ever. Teams, on the other hand, absolutely think this way. They optimize everything they can, and find solutions that save them a few bucks over and over again. They hire consulting firms to find new general managers who fit that ethos. You might find the lure of a divisional title to be unaffected by a new playoff format, but front offices won’t see it that way. They’ll cheer for the division title, the same as ever, but cold calculations rule team-building these days, and the numbers are clear.
Most of the other arguments against a 16-team playoff come down to taste and supposition. Would fan engagement really fall if division races stopped having meaning? Do people watch their team because of its talent level or because they want to have the sound of baseball on in the background? That’s not a question I have a solid answer for, and I’m not sure anyone does. I would find the regular season less dramatic in the new format, but I’m a baseball writer — I’d darn sure still be watching.
The owners seem to be betting that more baseball just means a bigger pie, that any downstream viewership effects from the new structure will be outstripped by the cost savings from no longer having to rely on free agency as heavily to construct teams who could feasibly win the World Series. That might be right, and it might be wrong — but even if baseball viewership remains static or declines, it might still be in their interests to pursue this plan.
I don’t claim to know what 16-team playoffs would do for the future of baseball in a broad sense. That’s a daunting projection to make, and I’m simply not up for it. I know baseball fans who check out unless their team is excellent and fans who just want to watch a baseball game every night regardless of the stakes. I’m quite confident, however, that it would disincentivize teams from trying to be Dodgers-esque juggernauts, and that that race to the middle would have a chilling effect on free agency salaries. Whatever the public talking points are, this is about money, plain and simple.
Any final decision on whether or not to expand the playoffs will happen in conjunction with the negotiation of a new CBA. It’s not impossible to imagine economic structures that could keep overall player outlay the same despite expanded playoffs — vastly increased minimum salaries, team control in the two to three year range instead of six to seven, and scuttling an arbitration system that saw teams literally exchange a championship belt for the club that did the best job suppressing fair wages. While it might seem like a sideshow, though, make no mistake: expanded playoffs are a pivot point for the way that teams will choose to spend money and build rosters going forward.
Ben is a writer at FanGraphs. He can be found on Bluesky @benclemens.
The expanded Play-off format becoming a permanent fixture is a terrible idea. Of course Manfred would endorse it. Its one of many reasons why I never could work up any interest in either the NBA or the NHL. What is the point of the regular season if it only serves as a precursor to the Post-Season? You can almost defend it in the NBA as the nature of the sport and the format of the series generally ensures that the best teams make it to the Finals. Baseball has no such mechanism. The randomness of a permanent 16 team playoff series almost guarantees that before long we will have a World Series champion with a loosing record in the regular season.
Everyone will have their own personal biases. But I have long believed that the sweet spot for any play-off tournament should be about 1/3 of your league. That grants enough room for talented teams that have to overcome some early bad luck, but generally excludes mediocre squads. So for me, 10 teams from a 30 team league was pretty much perfect.
If they are bound and determined to do this, because $$$$$$$$, then the only way to make it semi-acceptable would be that for the 6,7,8 seeds to eliminate the division winners, they have to beat them ALL THREE TIMES.
Why not a best of 2 series then? Feel like 3 seems excessive, and the MLB wants the variance. I do not think they would get behind all three times idea, because that would defeat the purpose of what they are trying to do.
You shouldn’t be able to be eliminated in two games if you win the division, and for a 6,7,8 seed to eliminate a division winner, it SHOULD be a steep uphill climb.
The problem with that format is that if the weaker team loses the first game (which would be the most likely outcome of that game), the series is already over. The whole point is the owners want to add games so that they can freely print that sweet sweet playoff cash.
With a 16 team playoff in a 30 team league, you’re virtually assured that the #8 seed is gonna be a below .500 team.
As Dan Syzmborski tweeted a couple days ago, your championship process involves a 80-82 team having better than 1/3 chance to knock out a 101-61 team, your championship isn’t even pretending to find the best team.
I understand there are competing interests between having a playoffs with suspense and surprise and in which multiple fanbases are invested, and one that reliably crowns the best teams in the sport as the champions, but the 16 team playoff so devalues being excellent and also removes a lot of the incentive for good teams to compete with each other.
See, for example, this exact week where the Dodgers/Padres series would have been an enormous deal in most seasons (1st and 3rd best records in MLB meeting at 2.5 games apart for a 3 game series that would swing who wins the division and who has to be a wild card), only here in 2020 you had the manager of one of those teams openly telling the press that they didn’t really care about the series outcome because there was no difference between divisional #1 and #2 this year and so they didn’t give a shit about the divisional title.
You’re losing all of that in return for opening the playoffs up to a bunch of mediocre .500 and worse baseball teams who have to compete with each other for the scraps at the back. It doesn’t produce ‘more’ divisional or playoff races; it moves them down the standings, making the best teams extremely secure in playoff spots that, as Ben describes here, are much less valuable than they have been, but also have much less suspense about who gets them.
You’re changing which teams are at risk or have incentives to compete, not adding more. The really good teams will have no regular season risk of missing out on the playoffs, an d also less payoff for anything they do aimed at the playoffs because their odds are necessarily lowered.
Like I am really trying to imagine how people can look at this week’s Dodgers/Padres series being completely irrelevant, to the extent that Dave Roberts, representing a team with the 2nd-longest division title streak in the history of the sport, is openly telling the press he didn’t care about the division title because there’s no advantage to winning it. The expanded playoff structure has a cost, and people who think it’s good should probably engage with that cost and explain why they’re fine with that instead of pretending that ’20+ teams have incentives to compete’. That’s not actually true: the teams that are already good have nothing to compete for, and no reason to try and improve further. Wins over about 86 are virtually meaningless.
I like this idea if these expanded playoffs are here to stay (hoping they are not). If Cleveland finishes with the 8 seed and throws Bieber out there to win Game 1, they should have to win two more and not the 1 seed having to win two in a row. I’d like to see the best of 3 series used only for two low end teams playing each other for the right to play an extended series with a high end team.
I’m of the mind that (a) 16 teams is just way too many and (b) if expanded playoffs are coming and we can’t stop it, please don’t go to 16 teams, and they should make the teams with the worse records play on the road the whole time or something.
“What is the point of the regular season if it only serves as a precursor to the Post-Season? ”
For me, and I don’t think I’m alone, it’s the rotisserie/fantasy season. I lose nearly all interest when the playoffs start. Your question made me wonder if perhaps someday a league will ditch the whole notion of a regular season and just have playoffs and in-season tournaments.
It depends what you value. All meaningful career stats are based on the regular season. I could care less who wins the WS or about anyone’s postseason achievements. I watch baseball every season, but I may or may not watch the playoffs in a given year.
Wow, Bolton. What a sad comment. Makes me wonder if perhaps rotisserie/ fantasy enthusiasts should simply play Stratomatic and leave the real sport alone.
Don’t lump the NHL with the NBA when it comes to playoffs. I keep seeing the point made about how bad the NBA’s first round is, which is true, but the NHL’s first round is always exciting and tournaments are a part of hockey culture.
As for the regular season, actually enjoying the sport itself helps a lot when finding a reason to watch the games.
IMO we always overvalue the postseason. What if you change your perspective to one where it never really did matter for anything more than bragging rights and revenue? All counting stats are based on the regular season… we just need to devalue the postseason. Want to talk about equity? Is a player really a HOF player because he lives in the right area code and has better access to resources than someone who doesn’t? Is that not what playoffs really measure? Expand the field and the value of luck gets larger in addition to the inequities that playoffs are already based on. I have never valued the playoffs too much and that is a pretty good solution to this situation. When the top two teams face off, then you have something worth watching but the WS isn’t generally that. Was BOS the best team two years ago? Was WAS the best team last year? Certainly not considering the regular season and the following season. The playoffs are fun if you want to pay attention, but they don’t have to mean much… now they certainly don’t mean much.
Agreed. The regular season determines the best team. Not the post season. It never did and it blows my mind that commenters on this site of all places have such an objection to it “cheapening the product.” The postseason basically never has the best team win. It is exceedingly rare. So why is it such a big deal if a 80 win team knocks off a 105 win but it is ok if a 90 win team does?
Maybe they could satisfy all fans and award the best record team a trophy as well. Why do baseball fans hate baseball so much?
Wow again. I’ve often wondered if a significant percentage of readers here were so caught up in the numbers that they’d lost sight of the point of competitive sports – TO WIN.
If all you care about are stats then just read the projections and devour Zips and stop watching the actual games. Maybe that’s what some of you do already. That’s pretty pathetic.
Not what I was saying at all..
I guess I’d just point out I agree with you but you’re also wrong: For most of baseball history, the best teams have won the world series because qualifying for the postseason was so limited. For most of it, only the 2 best teams faced off, and once we went to east/west division play, only the 4 best teams advanced. It is only since the introduction of 3 divisions + wild card – the last 25 years or so – that the world series winner has not consistently represented baseball’s cream of the crop.
The problem is that not only are we used to this because it’s how baseball history works but because it’s how our sports culture works. Other sports DO reliably crown their best teams as champions because better teams win games more frequently. #1 and #2 seeds in the NBA are like 23-1 in first round series over the last 6 years Upsets are virtually unheard of. The Dodgers are currently projected by FanGraphs to advance through the 3 game series to the LDS round 64% of the time. That is an enormous gap.
The culture of sports in the United States is that one team in each league is successful each year, that team wins the championship and is the best team, or at least one of the very best teams. 43-39 teams don’t win the NBA title. 8-8 teams don’t win super bowls.
If you assume that all the new teams added by the expanded playoffs are bad – like, 1/3 chance to win any series they play, say, such a team would have a 1/27 chance to make the world series. That’s not that high, you say. But there are 6 of them each season – so on average you’d see one of them do it every 4-5 years. Imagine if every 4-5 years the World Series had a 82-80 team in it. It makes a farce of the notion that the teams playing in the playoffs are among the best teams in baseball, or that you’re seeing baseball played at the highest level.
People legitimately and correctly believe that when they sit down and watch the NBA conference finals and NBA finals that they are seeing basketball performed at the highest level. They reliably see the best teams in the NFL show up in the super bowl. An expanded playoff structure will not give them that experience in baseball. There is simply too much influence from factors that aren’t the relative skill of the two teams.
I agree that we know that the regular season most reliably identifies the best baseball teams. But we don’t treat them like they’re successful. The Dodgers are probably the best ‘dynasty’ or long-term stretch by any franchise ever to not win a world series. And that is -an indictment- of their organization. They are treated like chokers who have failed to live up to their potential.
If this is our framework for consuming baseball – if people are going to hold the lack of a World Series ring against Clayton Kershaw come HOF voting and induction time, and people would probably do that – then we have to recognize that no one recognizes regular season success as the mark of a successful franchise. There is no one anywhere who would argue the Dodgers were a more successful team in the 2010s than the Giants – no one. They were almost certainly consistently a better team performing at a higher level than the Giants in that decade – that’s why they won dozens more games, 7 division titles, etc – but no one cares about that. The Giants won the only thing that matters to our evaluation of a team’s success. I would personally change that – because you’re right that placing so much emphasis on the playoffs is stupid. But this is where we are, and it won’t change, because its our sports culture beyond MLB. So we should not dilute the title further as a marker of excellence, because, for all its flaws, we’ve chosen for it to be the only one. If we dilute it, we simply won’t have one anymore, and we’ll have no reward, no payoff, for being an excellent baseball team. Teams will see no reason to do more than qualify for the crapshoot postseason, because whether you’re a 86 win or 96 win team won’t really change your odds much.
The Dodgers and Padres are the best two teams in MLB this year and they are lined up so they’re going to meet in the LDS round. The Dodgers are 64.5% to advance through the wild card. The Padres are 61.1%.
So there is a 39.4% chance we even see that matchup in the 2nd round – over half the time, one of the two teams (if not both) will have been knocked out by a .500 or worse team (the Cardinals? Marlins? Giants? Phillies?). Does this sound like good playoff baseball to you? Do you want to see two teams that couldn’t win half their games face off in a playoff series?
I don’t.
While I somewhat agree with your larger point, I don’t know about these blanket statements. I can prove yours wrong. The Dodgers absolutely had a more successful decade than the Giants. They have been the best team in baseball for 6 consecutive seasons. Not winning an exhibition in October doesn’t change that. The results in October should barely impact one’s perception of who the best baseball team is.
Regular season success is the mark of a great baseball team and I doubt I am alone. The reward and payoff of having a great baseball team is having a great record at the end of the season.
I do not think there’s any evidence that the fans of baseball teams, in general, share your opinion.
Im down for it if it means 6 less teams full on tanking every year.
Yeah it’s an awful idea and an obvious money grab.
In Manfred’s defense, at least part of his motivation for mentioning it is probably to see how the MLB commentariat will react. IMO they seem more than loud enough to discourage this idea — this is about the fifth journalist I’ve seen come with this take today. Hopefully the relevant people are listening.
I just keep thinking back to the NBA playoffs and how utterly depressing it is. There is a lot of mediocrity that gets in and so the whole first round is dull, and it burns me out way before you get to the championship series. It sucks the fun out of it.
I get that the whole point is to make it so that the rich teams don’t feel the need to get up over the luxury tax so this is a feature and not a bug (and to get some more cash out of the playoffs). But there can be too much of a good thing.
I’m against the expanded playoffs also, but it’s definitely not an advantage for the rich teams. The small market teams that barely spend in free agency are the ones who benefit the most from this. In the past, the only had small competitive windows when they were able to get several cost controlled young players at the same time.
In terms of World Series odds, this is a net negative for teams like the Dodgers and a huge positive for teams like the White Sox, Indians, Rockies, D-Backs, etc. Those teams aren’t going to spend enough to get superstars anyway, and now they’ll have more of a chance to sneak in and get lucky against a top team.
I don’t think we disagree. The idea is that there is little incentive for a team like the Dodgers or Yankees to put up huge amounts of money into the team if others will make it anyway and the advantages for teams with better records or who won the division are not great enough.
You framed this change as benefiting the owners of rich teams. That’s not true. It disproportionately benefits the owners of small market teams. Large market teams are pretty much going to spend what they’re going to spend. Teams like the Dodgers, Yankees, Cubs, and Red Sox are going to go right on running payroll in line with or slightly over the CBT every year, occasionally going under to reset the penalty.
The teams who this will affect the most are the ones who spend in cycles. For example, the Padres had spent very little for a long time, but once they had a stacked farm system, they doubled down on free agents like Hosmer and Machado. They aren’t going to keep being big spenders indefinitely, but they saw their window and added to their team to try to compete with LA. Those are the kind of moves that owners might be less inclined to make with a larger playoff pool.
Like the reality of baseball right now is that there are already disincentives to improve past a certain point that ensure that -only- the teams that are extremely deep in resources (like the Yankees and Dodgers) are inclined to do so. The actual ROI those teams are receiving from pushing for that extra edge is pretty bad – they’re doing it anyway, because they’re so flush with cash and resources that they can afford it. But the next tier down in revenue, teams like the Cubs and Red Sox, already don’t behave that way due to these incentives. The payoff for being better than about 90 wins in MLB is already pretty poor – you’re better of extending your title window into future seasons than improving an already-good team in a current season. These forces are already responsible for the various tank and restructure and refuse to invest behaviors you see from even quite rich teams in MLB; moving the threshold from 90 wins down to 85 will just make it worse, and may reduce the returns for the Dodgers and Yankees to the extent that not even they will bother. Currently, the Dodgers and Yankees make some gestures to the luxury tax and then also blow past it when appropriate. If you devalue their gains from doing so even further (and you are, since they neither need those extra wins to get into the playoffs, and the benefit of being better in the playoffs is muted by an extra, very short series), they’ll see less reason to do it.
Well, it benefits all owners by making it so that the richest teams are disincentivized from spending $300M contracts or buying whole bullpens. It doesn’t “help” the rich teams in terms of the W-L column–it just gives them one more reason not to spend money.
You are right that these incentives exist, but -despite them-, you have seen the Dodgers and Yankees sometimes toe the line and then break above it when they saw the opportunity to add a player who was good enough to impact their playoff scenarios (Cole, Betts). Those teams are so flush with resources that they can find a reason to do this despite incentives not to.
If you further reduce the impact of those acquisitions by adding another layer of randomness to the postseason, not even they will be able to justify it.
We want MORE teams to behave like the Dodgers and Yankees and make a play for major pieces, not less. This kind of thing will stop the handful of teams rich enough or desperate enough to be willing to defy their financial incentives. We should want to push the other way, and make it less compelling for the Cubs or Red Sox or the like to seek profit over a compelling baseball team.
And, for that matter, so do the players. That means more demand for valuable pieces and more bidding and higher salaries. And that’s why they have correctly identified playoff expansion as contrary to the interests of the union in a 162 game season, and many players were resistant to expansion even here in the 60 game season.
Extra talent doesn’t hurt. Those fringe teams are basically flipping coins to get in and other teams have a huge cushion by spending some money. At the end of the day I am sure they have a bigger advantage in a series than what some worthless simulation says. I am super anti-expanded field to be clear. In this era, making the playoffs doesn’t count for @#$! We simply cannot celebrate playoff births and we should probably give more praise to the best regular season teams.
Those are some poor examples. The Sox chased Machado into the $200millions and the DBacks signed Greinke to the huge contract.
I mean the Clippers, the title favorites according to the sportsbooks just got eliminated by the Nuggets. No one thought the Nuggets would make it to the conference finals…yet here we are. Sports inherently let in a lot of noise, and more in the MLB. I could see some alterations to the postseason, but as someone who loves fantasy baseball, I like this. Less teams giving up late in the year and sitting players, etc. While it will hurt the Yankees and the Dodgers of the world, I think overall it will be a boon for free agency, as more teams will be trying to compete. It is one of the few moves I have seen a sports league make to help out the little guy, ever.
How many times does that happen in the NBA though? That’s probably the biggest “upset” (the Nuggets are a good team, it’s not like they’re a bunch of scrubs) in the NBA in at least 5 years, maybe even more.
Yeah, it doesn’t happen often. And having a big upset happen every once in a blue moon is actually kind of fun.
The problem with the first round of the NBA playoffs is that they’re too long (it should be best of 5 instead of 7), not that there’s too many mediocre teams. Moreso than the MLB or the NFL, the NBA the game play is at a different level in the playoffs than in the normal season, so some of those mediocre teams aren’t so mediocre come playoff time. Even if you check out during the first round, I advise anyone to jump in the NBA playoffs after that because they’re a lot of fun.
You say it is one or the other, I say it is both. Playoffs should move quickly.
Personally, I’m more accustomed to the five-seven-seven format…
Whoops — edited to fix this error.
If they do ultimately end up sticking with 8 teams in each league (which I don’t like either) – there needs to be an added advantage for the division winners as an incentive. Whether it’s making all the first round games at the division winner’s home, or having the first round be a best of 5 but the division winner starts up 1-0, or both – there needs to be a reward for being the better teams over 162 games.
Maybe do something like a 7 team playoffs, and the team with the best record gets a bye in the first round?
My idea is to make the 6,7,8 seeds have to beat the division winners all three times in order to advance.
Make Wild Card a series rather than just a single game, that way their rotations are a bit more messed up.
I absolutely abhor the idea of a 16-game playoff bracket in a 162-game season. However, I think your statement is interesting:
“In a broad sense, the new format penalizes building a great team.”
Maybe, in a way, this would be a good thing? One of the more recent complaints about baseball in the last 5 years is the lack of parity; it’s mostly been feast-or-famine as far as the juggernauts/who makes it deeper into the playoffs (Yankees, Astros, Dodgers, etc.)
Suddenly, if you tell a middling team like the Reds that they can sneak into the playoffs and have a shot? Like you said, that incentivizes a team like that to go out and compete for that above-average talent in Free Agency.
Conversely, it sort of rewards teams like the Indians who try to sell their higher-profile pieces off because they know they can make the playoffs anyway.
Like I said though, I think expanding the playoff format even more than 5 or 6 teams per league really waters down the marathon 162-game season. I’ve been in favor of condensing to 154 games before to allow for more rest days, or even a slightly expanded Wild Card round, but anything more than that really cheapens the regular season, in my opinion.
Don’t even get me started on the idea of permanent 7-inning double-headers.
I don’t think penalizing great teams is ever a good thing and using this to fix parity issues is treating symptoms not this disease.
Professional sports are all about greatness. There is a reason I prefer watching MLB to watching high school baseball. We should be celebrating and encouraging greatness.
However, I also think that having a few juggernauts who spend twice as much as everyone else isn’t real greatness. If we encourage long term parity, teams will still have the chance to be be great in individual seasons and it will mean more when they do.
More playoff spots means more competition later into the year, meaning the regular seaaon is MORE important.
This isn’t true because there’s no competition on top. Look at the series the Dodgers and Padres just played. In any normal season, that series would have been extremely important: the best and 3rd-best records in MLB meet for 3 games, separated by 2.5, to determine who gets to win the division and who has to play a wild card coinflip game.
Only, because of this playoff structure, the series meant nothing, to the extent that the Dodgers, with the 2nd-longest division title streak in the history of baseball, were openly telling the media they didn’t care about who won the division title this year because there was no benefit to doing so.
You aren’t making more teams care; you’re changing which teams care. For every mediocre .500ish team who now has a chance to play for something, you have a pretty good team that might have had incentive to care about trying to win it’s division to avoid a wild card game but is now completely safe for playoff entry and is at no risk whatsoever. You have added the Marlins, Giants, Rockies, Brewers and Reds competing for the wild card scraps, but you have made the Dodgers, Padres, Cubs, and Braves completely secure and removed any value from seeding considerations between them. There’s no drama among the top 4 or so records because there’s nothing for them to gain – they’re all hosting wild card series, and there’s no real discernable advantage for any of them in terms of who they might play. The Dodgers and Padres could exchange the division crown and 2nd place, but there’s not even a meaningful difference in the #5 seed (likely the ..Marlins? lol) and the #8 seed (likely the ..Giants?). Heck, I bet a lot of folks would -prefer- to be the #4 seed and play the Marlins!
You’ve even created a negative incentive between the other divisional 2nd place teams, where it’s quite probable that being the #6 seed (the division 2nd place with the worst record) is probably better than being the #5 seed, since the #5 will have to play the Padres and the #6 will get to play the Braves or Cubs, who are not as good. You’ve also created a situation where divisional competitors are extremely likely to meet in the LDS round: the best-record division winner will be the #1 seed, and therefore you have a substantial chance of a situation like we’ll have this year where the #2 team from that division would have won one of the other divisions outright, but instead they will have to play their division partner in the LDS by virtue of maxing out as the #4 seed. Its really bad for both the Dodgers and Padres that they’re virtually guaranteed to meet in the LDS: they’re the two teams with the best WS odds in MLB despite being nearly guaranteed to meet relatively early on the playoff field.
If they were gonna do expanded playoffs, it would be a really good idea to seed purely by record and not by divisional placement to avoid those kinds of problems. If the Cubs, Braves and Padres were all in a situation where the worst record among them would be the one stuck on the Dodger side of the bracket, they’d have some reason to compete with each other (as being on the other half of the bracket is an advantage: the Dodgers might lose a short series before you have to play them). Instead, the Padres are stuck on the Dodger half of the bracket, to their detriment, and there’s no reason for the Braves and Cubs to care about their relative records because they’re going to be together on the other side anyway.
Everything you are mentioning has nothing to do with more teams, and everything to do with bad seeding. Divisions shouldn’t exist, there’s no reason. What people don’t understand is any progress is good. If we go back to normal next year the Padres will most likely end up with a one game playoff while having a better record than other division winners. So I will take a flawed system for now that’s still better for my team. Further I strongly believe that more playoff spots still results in better competition down the stretch as evident by the Marlins acquiring talent at the deadline. While the Padres were separated by 2.5 games you are forgetting how the postponements in the days prior affected their plans in conjecture with having two starters who you were going to be giving innings so they could get right ready for the playoffs coming off injury. Th fact worse teams beat great and elite teams frequently doesn’t change the fact that their is still a big advantage to being great.
Yeah, except it didn’t matter, at all, whatsoever, who won the division, and neither team really cared, because it had no meaningful rewards. The Dodgers didn’t view the series as do or die, and neither did the Padres, because it had negligible effects on their postseason prospects, which are instead gated by the wild card series win or loss – in a normal schedule, the division winner gets to skip that and gets an advantage.
You’re talking about how the Padres set up their pitching, but I’m talking about the other team, the one without a disrupted schedule, the one with a historic streak of division titles, and the one that was ahead and could cement that title by winning the series, and their manager was openly telling the press that they didn’t give a damn because there was no difference between divisional first and second, and they would not expend extra resources in order to win the series.
You gave up that meaningful, competitive series in order to give a crap about whether the Marlins are a .500 team. It is a -tradeoff-. You don’t get both. You may view that as better for your team (it probably is better for them as they have to play a series either way, and now the Dodgers could potentially lose a WC series and they don’t have to play them in that case), but you also give up the advantage of skipping it if your (very good) baseball team ever manages to win a division title. What would have been an incredibly meaningful series and advantage is instead irrelevant, and neither the Dodgers or Padres are playing for -anything- this week, whatsoever. There are no stakes, and haven’t been for over a week now.
That may benefit your team in this particular season (it does), but that doesn’t mean it will benefit them in the future, and it doesn’t make the game come without a corresponding cost elsewhere. That cost is that no one in the American League is playing for anything and that the top 4 seeds in the NL more or less have no discernable reason to worry or care about what happens this week. Individual seeding advantages are meaningless, because the morass of teams competing for the 5-8 seeds are all largely the same, and there’s no guarantee that being the #1 seed actually gets you a weaker opponent than being the #4, or that there’s an advantage of being #2 over #3. Instead, the stakes are moved down to crappy baseball teams competing to see which of them can avoid losing 31 games, and probably at least one team that goes 29-31 will still get into the postseason anyway.
And in the AL the playoff field is basically set and the only meaningful seeding consideration is whether the A’s can catch the Rays for the privilege of playing the 1 team of the 8 that’s significantly worse than the other 7 (the Jays).
Beginning in 2021, just go back to the 2019 model while expanding the four LDS series to best-of-seven. It adds at least four (and as many as eight) Postseason games to the schedule while still maintaining the integrity of the regular season and the importance of winning a division.
This really isn’t that hard.
If they needed more games, they could also expand the one-game wild card play-in game into a short series, like a best of 3
Or implement both and crown the champion at the end of a best-of-11 World Series on Christmas Day!
While I’m not a fan of expanded postseason, I’ve actually never understood why MLB didn’t do a best of 5 DS, then a best of 7 CS, then a best of 9 WS. Aesthetically it would make more sense, and you’d get at least one guaranteed extra WS game, which I don’t think many people would complain about.
The problem with adding games to the preliminary series is the calendar. Night games in November isn’t great.
Go back to the old 154 schedule and add a monthly double header (9 innings).
When was the last time MLB ever went back to anything? They only address something after a lot of public criticism and even then they don’t roll it back but they go to something else. They only go forward and it doesn’t matter how stupid their ideas are. Here is my general take on their “direction”. Baseball in synonymous with tradition – it always has been. Our society straight up hates tradition. I think MLB is trying to be the most progressive of the major sports – a rebranding of sorts. Good, bad, or ugly isn’t important, they just want new, young, different and the implication is “better” but that is subjective. Those kind of blind progressive ideals are built on the idea of not looking back and they don’t embrace any level of accountability. There is also the reality that $$$ comes first, second and third in terms of priorities in decision making. Don’t expect MLB to do the right thing for the game because they won’t.
I think that your attempted criticism of progressivism writ large is misguided, but that you eventually get to the right conclusion that, in professional baseball, it’s all about the money in the end. If baseball owners have one true tradition, it’s doing whatever is going to make them a few extra bucks. I personally like the new progressive stance and measures the league is taking, but I don’t doubt for a second that it’s a cynical ploy that the owners think will result in more dollars for them in the long run. Welcome to late stage capitalism!
Yeah–the Pohlads aren’t suddenly going Marxist
There might actually be *more* good ways to expand playoffs than bad, but Manfred *still* managed to endorse a terrible plan. That’s what’s so freakin infuriating about him; he just sucks 🙁
Two other side effects:
The trade deadline gets weird. A few teams will be basically in, a few teams will be clearly out, and a lot of teams will be in the middle. We have this now a little with the wild card, but it gets even more pronounced with an expanded playoff field. Will this lead to fewer moves since there are fewer pieces available? Will teams pay more for lesser players because demand is up and supply is down? I don’t know and I predicted a much slower trade deadline this year, so if I guessed I would probably be wrong.
Unless the advantages for higher seeds are very big, teams will stop trying so hard down the stretch. The players will still play hard of course, but more guys will get more rest and pitchers especially will not be extended since the goal will be to have them ready for the post season, not getting to the post season once it is clear that is going to happen. This is already happening. The White Sox have a magic number of 1 to make the playoffs and are 2 games up on the Twins with 11 to play (9 for the Twins). Winning today would go a long way towards clinching the central, but they have moved Dallas Keukel back a few days even though he is reportedly healthy after straining his back. They will be starting Reynaldo Lopez. He has 2 starts already this year against the Twins: 2.1 IP, 7R, 7H, 2HR, 4BB, 2K. They have decided it is more important to set up the rotation and see if Lopez can contribute than win today.
I like your speculation on player acquisition better than Ben’s. Overall I think ASB demand remains about the same for the Ace Starter, the hot-bat-on-expiring-contract, and the Hot Reliever — just the quality of teams in pursuit of those shift slightly in that overall demand from more teams is offset by the decreased demand from the near-Super-Teams.
I don’t think this new playoff format has any effect on SuperStars in FA. As Ben says, there are no substitutes for 4+-win players and SuperStars and Relievers are really the whole point of FA. Maybe 2-win catchers are worth getting in FA too. Don’t worry Ben — Superstars will still make $200M+!
I agree that the expanded playoff format dilutes the value of the Regular Season. Might as well go back to 154 games.
The idea that an expanded playoff will lead to teams to not try so hard down the stretch seems weird. Like, teams have always done the type of thing that the White Sox are doing with Lopez with the normal playoff set up. That’s not a new thing to this year at all. Plus, normally at the end of the season the rosters expand, so it’s much easier for teams to actually rest players. Probably the only teams that don’t rest their players as much are the ones that are in a competitive position. Teams that are realistically in the playoffs already or realistically out of the playoffs wouldn’t have an issue resting players. So if you want less players resting down the stretch, you should want more teams fighting for playoff spots, which would mean expanded playoffs.
I hadn’t thought about expanded playoffs would affect the trade market, but that’s an interesting thought.
Normally it wouldn’t be when playing the team in second, three games behind you, with 11 to play. What this system does is greatly accentuate the issue of teams playing for games two weeks from now more than they are playing the game today.
If this were a normal season with 5 playoff teams in each league and a WC play in game, the White Sox would be 5 or 6 games up on a playoff spot in general with 11 to play, not 10. The advantage for winning the division would be bigger. They would not be punting a game against the Twins if they were only 3 games behind them They would start Keuchel. For teams at the top, it will mean LESS meaningful baseball down the stretch,
I get what you’re saying now. The Sox have no threat of falling out of the playoffs or losing some advantage this season if they punt this game against the Twins.
I think it’s a matter of just shifting the “important games” from the teams at the top of the rankings to the teams in the middle of the rankings though. And my guess is that there would be more parity, and so more teams would find themselves in that middle tier than are normally in the top tier – so more important games. But that’s just my guess.
Manfred is awful and this move is the classic owners suggesting something fans will largely like (more playoff teams, better chance for your team to win it all) which also accomplishes the goal of screwing players. Hopefully team control and arbitration is massively changed to even things out.
As for the 16-team playoffs, if it’s 8 teams from each league, then maybe something like:
5 seed vs 8 seed and 6 vs 7 in 1-game knockouts
Then the winners facing 4 and 3 respectively in a 5-game series.
Then the winners of that facing 1 and 2 respectively in a 7-game series.
And finally those winners in the league championship 7-game series.
And on to a 7-game World Series.
Maybe it’s all played consecutively (unless series end early) to reward higher seeds and make it more daunting to for the 5-8 seeds.
1 and 2 seeds need to win 12 to win it all.
3 and 4 seeds need to win 15 to win it all.
5 thru 8 seeds need to win 16 to win it all.
Is sitting around for a week an advantage for the best teams?
Except the odds for your team winning are still the same. Under this scenario, your odds of getting in the playoffs are greater, but lower once you’ve qualified. If my team was having a great year, I’d rather not run the risk of getting having the season come down to a best of three against a crappy team that might have an ace pitcher who could steal a game.
“…I’d rather not run the risk of getting having the season come down to a best of three against a crappy team that might have an ace pitcher who could steal a game.”
As an A’s fan, this is *exactly* why I want absolutely nothing to do with Cleveland in the Wild Card Round.
I prefer fewer teams in the playoffs for MLB but consider this format for teams that are losing on purpose to gain draft picks and build a window to win. I think fewer teams would use this strategy if every team had a better chance. To me the organizations that lose to win is what ruins competition. The Marlins post World Series fire sale the Astros losing for draft picks. Rewarding losing is worse than rewarding perpetual mediocrity. Promote organizations that get their exciting young talent to the majors instead of waiting for that talent to be the final push.
I guess I am agnostic to this more than most people. I wouldn’t say I like the idea, but hey more competitive meaningful baseball games can’t be that bad of a thing, right? I’ve always sort of liked the underdog idea, so this at the very minimum gives the chance for some large “upsets” even if the odds weren’t that long in the first place. Besides did people actually think the team that won the World Series was the best team? We know who the best team is. It is the Dodgers. It was the Dodgers last year too. Does the end result of a world series change who is the “best team?” Some of the comments here seem like they don’t even want a postseason at all…they just want the best team to win. What is the fun in that? What enjoyment do you get from knowing the outcome? This is a change that helps out the middling teams and hurts the Yankees and Dodgers of the world so it isn’t all bad.
With that said, I certainly would like to see the best teams get some sort of reward. Assuming they are going to keep the expanded playoffs, maybe go to 7 teams per league and give the best team a bye (assuming first round is 3 games). Or if they want to keep 8 team playoffs, let the division winners host (1 vs 8, 2 vs 7, 3 vs 6) a best of 2 series where the lower seed has to win both games on the higher seeds ballpark to advance, and the higher seed just has to win 1. Then 4 plays 5 in a 3 game series. This would increase the likelihood that the higher seed advances since they would only have to win 1 game, and give them a possible extra day or two rest over the teams that didn’t win their division. Feel like that would accomplish their goal of getting postseason revenue, while also giving the division winners a larger advantage.
Yeah, if you’re really only concerned about determining the “best team” there’s a 162-game tournament that happens before the playoffs start.
Which is what I’m saying! The team that wins the most games is who I consider the best team. Playoffs are fun! I know fan bases get emotionally attached to results in the playoffs (see Giants/Dodgers Red Sox/Yankees) but it doesn’t necessarily mean that team that won it all is better. They just won the tournament!
If the games are only competitive because the bar is lowered, then it can be a bad thing. Two AAA teams battling to make it to the next round of the playoffs isn’t good IMO. It depends on if you value good baseball, which I am certain most people do not even know what that should look like. Baseball in 2020 is a travesty and I don’t see people talking about it. I like the idea of competitive baseball played by good teams as opposed to simply competitive baseball.
If you’re against it, there’s a 100% chance it’s a good idea. Sucks for you sports didn’t get permanently canceled, I guess you’ll always find something to whine about though
Least Valuable Take Award frontrunner right here.
This take was so hot my monitor is fried. Now my IT guy is super pissed. Thanks.
You could have at least gone the broken clock is right twice a day route.
Yeah, really sucks that there is baseball to write about and that people are visiting the site to read about it. I bet Ben hates being able to pay his bills and buy food.
At least TRY not to be an idiot.
If this happens the players need to push back and get a 154 game season out of it, otherwise its more games for not necessarily more money.
I think they are doing fine financially. Of all the reasons not to support this idea, I think this is near the bottom of my personal list.
The only reason the owners would want more playoffs is because it makes them more money. If more money comes in, the players deserve a cut too.
The owners are also doing fine financially. Look at what the Wilpons are getting for 35 years of badly managing the Mets.
I hate every single thing about expanded playoffs. I can live with in a one-off weird season like this, but I really have an issue with it in “regular” seasons, mostly for the reasons Ben mentions.
If this must be a thing, I hope they change it from the usual 1 v. 8, 2 v. 7, etc, etc. How about make the “wild cards” face each other in a preliminary opening round? It’s technically the playoffs but it’s more like a play-in type of thing. I don’t know, I doubt it would happen anyways
Agreed. This format will get puked on if Cleveland and SF win 2 of 3. Outside of their fan base who wants to see those teams playing a 7 games series in October?
I’m not a fan of either of these teams, but do you mean because of the market size? I’d make the argument that Cleveland has one the more entertaining teams in baseball. Probably the best pitcher (Bieber) and two young superstars in Lindor and JRam. Whereas the Yankees are the Yankees, but I do not see how they are more exciting? But sure, the Giants. Gross. And could you imagine Kapler somehow thinking he did something right? Ugh shutter just thinking about it.
The Yankees do have a lot of power and chicks dig the long ball.
I mean because they aren’t great teams right now. Cleveland has great pitching and did well early on, but to lose 8 games in a row in a pennant race shows me how not good they are. With this format they can continue to lose out and will still be allowed a chance to sneak into a ALDS with serious holes in their team. This season is the best-case scenario for this format as it would be so early in a normal season to make any definition judgement on how good a team is, but in the future after 162 games if they’ve finished 7th best in the league GO HOME!
The Indians have the best rotation in baseball.
Yes, and they’ve also lost 8 games in a row (just snapped that). I’d like to see the best overall TEAMS playing and the Indians aren’t that right now. They’re 7th best by record in the AL and in baseball I think 7th best should mean shutting it down for the winter and figuring out how to get better, shortened season or not. but if they can beat a top team 3 games in a row in the first round then that’s the behavior that should be rewarded.
The Yanks lost 7 in a row and 5 in row, the Padres lost 5 in a row. Losing games in a row is absolutely meaningless.
“It’s inarguable, however, that this structure reduces the incentives to be great” a horseshit take in a horseshit article. The NFL, NBA, and NHL have great teams and even elite teams. Two of those leagues have MORE viewership.
The two leagues with more viewership (NFL and NBA) have considetably less randomness than MLB. The better NBA team virtually never loses in the first round, and that’s especially true for elite teams. Elite MLB teams get bounced fairly regularly (106 win Dodgers in the first round last year, for example). And this is easily discerned: How much money are you looking to wager that all home teams will win in the first round this year? I mean, even the Dodgers, who look like the clear best team this year, could easily lose 2-orf-3 and be sent home.
There are certainly unknowns about the impact of expanded playoffs, but I think Ben’s point is sound.
Great and elite are subjective terms and I think you are using both too liberally. The NFL is a pile of mediocrity where very few teams are a lock for anything.
16 teams seems like far to many. But if expanded playoffs went along with league expansion I think adopting the NFL’s 12 team format along with adding 2 new teams would be a fantastic change.
For sure. Manfred seems incapable of thinking in any type of nuance, and pisses everyone off by making these asinine suggestions.
I think the if this is a big “must have” for the owners in the coming CBA, the players should come back with accepting it only if they get some big salary guarantees in return, including a fix to service time manipulation, a guaranteed percentage of MLB revenues (regular and post-season), earlier arbitration, higher minimum salary, and a team salary floor.
I think “greatness” is overrated, as a team-concept. But as far as “greatness” is concerned, the expanded playoff format isn’t going to stop great players from being great. It isn’t going to stop players from performing at the levels they normally perform. Baseball would still be baseball. Let’s not pretend like, as fans, the sky would be falling.
And while I’m not defending the expanded playoff format as the best way to go about it, I for one would like to see more parity during the regular season. I’d like to see more always put the best team on the field that they can. I think lowering the bar to enter the playoffs would be one way to do that. If that comes at the expense of being able to label a team as “great”, then so be it. “Great” will always be relative to the other teams in the league, so raising the floor of other teams should lower the ceiling of a “great” team, and vice-versa.
As far as the money stuff goes, there seems to be a contradiction in here. On the one hand, the author claims that teams will continue to shy away from signing mid-tier free agents because teams have learned how to replace those players on-the-cheap, and have been perfectly fine if that replacement is slightly worse than the mid-tier free agent would be. On the other hand, the author claims that the expanded playoffs won’t mean that bubble-teams would necessarily go after star players because they could spread out their improvement by signing a number of lesser players instead, and make series of small gains instead of one large gain. But those lesser players that teams would sign would be… mid-tier free agents.
Right now mid-tier free agents aren’t valued because there aren’t enough teams that care about improving in small gains. While again, I’m not defending the expanded playoff format, giving teams a reason to make improvements in small amounts seems like it’d have affect on players’ salaries, but in a way that’s the opposite of chilling.
I do agree with the author that the influx of money from an expanded playoff will be something that gets covered in negotiations for the next CBA.
Overall this article is weird, but I think it can be summed up in that the author seems to conflate two different statements throughout: “the new format penalizes building a great team” and “this structure reduces the incentives to be great“. These are two different statements. The first one is false – no, the new format doesn’t penalize having a great team; a great team will still be a great team. (If you want to argue that a great team would now have more surplus skill than it needs, you could make that argument – but that’s always been true about teams at the “great”-end of the skill-level spectrum, and it will always continue to be so.) The second statement is true – the new playoff format doesn’t give as many advantages to having a great team. But there’s a difference between the two statements, and the second one being true doesn’t not-make the first one false.
Thanks for sharing well-articulated thoughts. I enjoy the few posts like this that get to read. My solution is to devalue the postseason and that fixes most of this. Personally, I never valued the postseason in terms of greatness. It is the only baseball on at that time of year but I don’t put much premium on it.
Expanded playoffs do, indeed, penalize great teams by increasing the odds that they will be eliminated by a lesser team in those playoffs.
No, that’s not what a penalty is. A penalty is the result of doing something.
Great teams aren’t getting punished for doing something. Have their odds of winning the WS changed? Sure. But so are the odds of all the non-great playoff teams. (And so are the odds of formerly not-playoff teams that are now in the playoffs.) Additionally, if the WS odds of a great team are changed, does that mean they aren’t a great team anymore? Does that mean they ever were?
(A penalty would be something like a greatness tax – “this team is too great so we’re going to spot their opponent a few games”.)
I don’t like the expanded playoffs one bit. It totally changes the calculus for how you behave in the regular season, because instead of being a great team, you just have to be less shitty than the teams behind you. That’s what got us to the months long exhibition that is the NBA regular season. I could see it also affecting roster construction – ‘all you need to be is good enough to squeak in’ would lend itself well to a roster like Milwaukee’s the past couple years, which didn’t have any starter depth to speak of but was built around a relief corp that could dominate in a short series.
I also don’t think that a sub .500 team’s push for a W.C. spot is going to really drum up that much interest from their fans, nor do I think baseball is well served by said sub .500 team getting hot and knocking out a quality opponent. I hope the Reds sneak in and beat the Dodgers in the first round, so MLB gets to enjoy the entirely foreseeable consequences of this setup!
I’m a chaos guy, I am hoping for a Reds Dodgers series too.
How much do you like that they did this on opening day lol!
I like the analysis part, but disagree with the speculative part.
If there ever was a change that would boost the value of mid-tier free agents, this would be it.
One way to think about it is this.
If MLB were to reduce the number of playoff teams, I think it is pretty clear that mid-tier free agents would suffer even more relative to the stars.
At the end of the day, MLB teams’ main objective is to maximize value rather than to maximize wins.
While your argument that top teams needing to jam 5 WAR into a single roster spot increases the value of superstars is certainly valid, I think that only captures half of the picture.
Namely, fans prefer to root (and spend money) for several superstars on their teams rather than a team filled with above-average but not necessarily elite players.
I like how you threw in the idea (with zero evidence) that expanded playoffs would dilute salaries as a way to beef up your point that it would be bad.
Wholeheartedly agree with this article and it doesn’t even mention the fact that the separation of talent in the MLB is far smaller than in the NFL or NBA. If this change happens the MLB can kiss goodbye to my viewing eyes and eventually the same will happen for many of their fans (at least in the regular season). Akin to the current NBA situation.
So you like baseball enough to comment on an article about it in the middle of the regular season, but you’ll decide to simply stop caring about it all next year if a couple more teams get in the playoffs?
The same ppl who are already watching game #54, 92 and 126 will continue to do so…..because they enjoy watching baseball. If anything expanded playoffs might pull out in a few more causal fans when the playoffs start. What it isn’t going to do is prevent a hard core Yankees fan from watching as much Yankee baseball as he can get his eyes
It does happen. The NBA got boring when it became all about swapping contracts. I stopped watching in the 00’s. Then the NFL started changing their rules and the way the game was played (don’t touch the QB, hit low, no hit high, no don’t hit hardJ) while denying the concussion epidemic and creating ridiculous marketing campaigns like “NFL is family” while ignoring episodes like Ray Rice, then reversing course completely. Not to mention the National Anthem thing, and owners moving their teams every 5 years.
I stopped watching the NFL 3 years ago and haven’t missed it anywhere near as much as I thought I would. If Manfred and the owners continue to chip away at baseball (DH, 7 innings, runners on 2nd to start extra innings, expanded playoffs)….as much as I’ll miss it, I (and others) won’t stick around to watch another duplicitous corporate troll like Manfred butcher the game we have grown up on.
I think this format works only for a season with 60 games, but in the future I’d like to see 154 game seasons with more days off for players and a wild card series that’s best of three. I feel like most games by the 154 mark are already useless so most viewers won’t be so interested. A three game series ensures that better teams make it to the DS and has more playoff baseball MLB can easily market.
I have zero understanding as to how 60 games figures into anything.
I don’t generally agree with most of the ideas pitched around FG, but this is one that I am fully on board with. Expanding the playoff field is bad for good baseball. You are going to have mediocre teams lucking their way into the playoffs. Its good for revenue. It certainly rewards mediocrity. Perhaps it does discourage tanking? The fact that I even have to consider that tells you that MLB is already highly dysfunctional.
It never made any sense to implement any of the changes that they did this year. I have always been pretty certain that most of these changes will be permanent. They used the pandemic as a tool to roll out a bunch of progressive ideals that otherwise would have gotten some scrutiny.
I don’t think this has anything at all to do with politics, if that’s what you mean about “progressive” ideas. I think it has everything to do with money. This is a business that looks to maximize its profits. To the extent it does that without impacting my enjoyment, it’s irrelevant to me. If those ideas really do lead to more mediocrity/cheapen the product, then I would care.
Really good work, Ben. Very clear, sharp analysis. I don’t think the move towards mediocrity would happen over night, because some of the teams h ave such investments in their existing rosters that they might feel the need to support that, but intermediate term, the owners are going to love seeing every free agent priced lower. It’s likely to bring in more money that even the additional TV revenues from the playoff games. But it might not be all upside, particularly for the lower-revenue teams, because they will likely get less of a return on assets they are selling before the trading deadline to playoff contenders. Also, as market salaries diminish across the board, the comparative value of multi-year extant contracts at (old) FMV will decline as well, also reducing the return on those sales.
As to the game on the field? Hard to tell, since the net talent would likely be the same, just distributed differently.
I like the idea of spotting the division winners a game so their path is easier.
You can also expand without a linear bracket. If you want 8 teams in each league you can go to pool play.
3 div winners play round robin 2x to get the top 3 seeds (4 games each). Hosted by top seed.
The bottom 5 also play round robin (4 games each) hosted by top seed and 1 team advanced to divisional round.
After that it’s the typical 5-7-7 bracket.
Winning the division, having the best record overall, and having the best record of the WC teams is all rewarded and doesn’t take up a ton of time.
I was thinking about proposing a similar format, where you have a division winners group and a wild card group. You could even have a play in series between the top two wild cards to get a 4th team in the winners group and maintain 4 teams in the wild card group.
Winner of the division winners group advances to the LCS, while the winner of the wild card group joins a new final group / bracket with the three teams that didn’t win the division winners group, with the winner advancing to the LCS.
I think there are fun ways to do this, but they all need to require some mechanism that aligns a teams odds of winning with their success in the regular season.
I love fangraphs but I’m confused by the continuously negative/critical tone of most articles that I read here. Sure extended playoffs will discourage 100 win teams but it will also greatly reduce tanking. Isn’t increased parity that what we we’ve wanted all along?
I’d be totally fine with a 12-team, NFL style playoff format. The 3-6 seeds play in a Wildcard round with a three game series before moving on the the Division Series. I don’t think that it will water down the competition level too much. If this was the format in 2019, the Indians and Mets would have been in the mix. This would allow teams stuck in loaded divisions to be rewarded for playing well despite a tough strength of schedule. Also, a three-game match will eliminate some of the randomness of a one-game sudden death match by favoring the team with a deeper/healthier roster.
As a man who prefers substance over volume this sucks. MLB’s image problem will not be aided by a watered down league across the board.
Adding playoff revenue to more teams sounds interesting, but with teams now having an incentive to not spend on talent we could be looking at a boring, .500 league where owners make money and fans reluctantly show up. We’ll have more tanking teams filling rosters with cost controlled talent, because even when youre rebuilding you can get lucky and make these playoffs.
You’d would think this would require them to make changes to the luxury tax threshold and more.
Not a fan of expanded playoffs.
Two things I’ve always liked about baseball are the relative exclusivity of the playoff field and the extensive minor league system that develops players for the MLB club. Regrettably, for me, the MLB seems like it is moving away from both of those features that are unique to baseball.
I get the expanded playoffs this year but I’m not terribly excited by the fact the Jays are looking like they’ll make the playoffs this year as a mediocre team in a field of 16. On the other hand, August and September 2015 were unbelievably exciting for Jays fans as they climbed up the standings to take first place in the AL East. We’ll lose that with the expanded playoff field.
I got hooked on baseball when I was a kid in the 1960s and the “pennant race” made every day of ball in August and September interesting. The intensity of those September series between the Giants and Dodgers or, later, the Mets and Cardinals, was enhanced by the narrative that was building throughout the regular season. The thrill of the pennant race has already been greatly diminished by expanded playoffs and it will only be more so if playoffs are further expanded. As it is, my interest in baseball wanes in October because I know the playoff outcomes are basically random and the September excitement is found more in the pennant race of my roto league. You can’t expand playoffs without diminishing the significance of regular-season games to an equal degree.
Rob Manfred is an Intergalactical Disgrace
More shambolic mismanagement under Manfreds tenure. Everyday I question why I invest any amounts of time in following this sport in its current manifestation. Uh maybe its it’s just Gary Keith and Ron.
“To paraphrase the late, great Chris Wallace, if it ain’t one thing, it’s another freaking other.”
1. When did Chris Wallace die? He’s supposed to moderate a Presidential debate this year.
2. When did he become “great?” I can see perhaps describing his father Mike that way but not Chris.
3. I associate what you paraphrased with Roseanne Rosannadanna. I guess I’m getting old.
I see that Market Maker beat me to the draw but I think this is worth saying again and I will add some more words about the possible benefits.
Structure, 16 teams, with a phase in.
In each league the 8 seeds compete in these phases…
8 v 5 and 6 v 7 (perhaps a 1 game play in, maybe a 3 game series)
winners v 3 and 4 (3 game series)
winners v 1 and 2 (7 game series, winners play again in another 7 game LCS)
Benefits.
Each tier is extremely important. At the bottom, there are more spots available and tanking is qecentivized since a decent team with some luck can squeeze in. Also, more money for the league (can we blame them for wanting to make money?). In the middle, the “race” for the top 4 and especially the top 2 gives very valuable bye rounds. The top stratosphere remains just as valuable as before (the top two teams would essentially be in a “four team” playoff just as they are now since there would already have been four eliminations).
The main objection (already raised in a reply to Market Maker) is that the layoff might hurt the top teams. However, the KBO already does something like this (even more extreme) and the top teams to not seem to be hurt by the layoff according to my limited knowledge (although maybe that is worth exploring as a test case for the “long layoff is harmful” theory).
So, theoretically, the TOP tier remains just as valuable (or at least nearly so). The playoff race is increased because there is tangible value at multiple levels (the “race for second place” becomes a thing). While at the BOTTOM tanking becomes less desirable (some good players and a few lucky breaks can get you into the playoffs, even needing to survive ‘extra’ rounds baseball is still random enough to make it worth a shot and to make the fanbase less likely to ‘go along’ with a long term tanking strategy). Ergo, top free agents retain their value and mid-level free agents actually regain some value.
Opening the Pandora’s box of expanded playoffs has been a net negative. Having wild card team winning the WS is a joke, anything that devalues the regular season isn’t good. I know MLB will never go back to the Stone Age of AL champ vs. NL champ in the WS, but that was the truest competitive form. I’m not sure where the sweep spot lies between fair competition and revenue generation, but the direction baseball is going will not end well.
I know it wouldn’t be enough postseason games to suit the MLB, but if you had seven playoff teams in each league, you could have the wildcards play each other seeded by record in two days. There wouldn’t be a big delay to get to divisional series and there would be a bigger incentive for teams to try to win.