On the Inequity of the 2015 NL Wild Card Game

The Wild Card races in the American and National Leagues could hardly be more different. Over in the AL, only four teams are playing at a level that would normally make them contenders, but the rules require that a fifth team qualify for the postseason, so one team from a remarkably mediocre group is going to get rewarded with a playoff spot even though they may end the year with 82 or 83 wins. The AL Wild Card game is very likely going to feature one of the weakest postseason teams we’ve seen since the playoffs expanded to include non-division winners.

In the National League, though, the Wild Card game is going to be a clash of the titans. The three best records in the NL all come from the Central division, meaning that the Wild Card game is likely to be a showdown between the Pirates and Cubs, unless one of those two can run down the Cardinals for the division title. There are still other possible outcomes, but most likely, the NL Wild Card game this year will pit two excellent Central division teams against each other, probably for the right to play the NL Central winner in the Division Series.

Meanwhile, the winners of the NL West and NL East — right now, the Dodgers and Mets, who currently hold the fourth and fifth best records in the league — are set to play each other for the right to advance to the NL Championship Series. Because of the playoff structure and the dominance of the Central teams this year, we’re almost guaranteed to only have one team in the NLCS out of the clubs with the three best regular season records, with lesser performing teams getting an easier path to the pennant.

And, understandably, that’s frustrating for anyone rooting for an NL Central club this year. The Wall Street Journal’s Jared Diamond spoke to some of the players on the teams involved, who said things like this:

“It can annoy you, because it just doesn’t make sense,” said San Francisco outfielder Marlon Byrd, a 14-year veteran.

“I think when you really look at it, black and white, you say, ‘Why not let the best five teams go at it, regardless of division?’” (Neil) Walker said.

As Diamond explains in his piece, though, there are pretty good reasons for why the system is setup the way it is. The no-division, just-take-the-five-best-teams approach not only does away with the tension and drama of multiple playoff races, but it’s a logistical nightmare. If you just have one big pool of potential playoff teams, then everyone has to play the same schedule, and no one really wants players to build even more travel into the schedule so that the Padres and Marlins can play each other more often. Trying to create a schedule where everyone plays the same opponents the same number of times only works if you have a smaller geographical area to cover or if you have more days off to accommodate the extra cross-country flights.

So a balanced schedule is probably a non-starter, which makes the idea of division-less playoff qualifications highly unlikely. It might be a nice idea in theory, but in practice, it just doesn’t work. But perhaps there are other ways to eliminate the problem of forcing two of the league’s best teams to play one game that will determine their season?

Perhaps the most obvious potential solution is to expand the Wild Card game into a Wild Card series, most likely a three game contest that would be similar to most every other series teams played against each other all year. While this wouldn’t do anything about the fact that the Cubs and Pirates are being dealt a worse hand than the Mets and Dodgers, it would somewhat reduce the amount of randomness that would determine the winner. Expanding to a three game Wild Card series would give each team a better opportunity to feel like they got a fair shot, and make it less likely that a weird bounce or a bad call could be responsible for ending a team’s season.

However, in terms of theatre and entertainment value, the Wild Card play-in games are about as good as baseball gets right now. The contests the last few years have been fantastic events for viewers, and in making a play for greater equity for the participants, you’d risk trading some of the entertainment value for the spectator. A three game Wild Card series is more fair, but perhaps less entertaining, and the postseason tournament has never been about maximizing fairness. If we were really looking to maximize our ability to reward the best teams, then the season would end after 162 games. Determining a champion by who plays the best over a three week tournament instead of a six month season is inherently choosing excitement over equity, so walking that back to make the playoffs more fair but less exciting isn’t necessarily a net positive.

And, of course, there’s some logistical issues with a three game Wild Card series as well. Unless all three games were held in the same city, you’d have to build in a travel day, so now the three game series would take four days to play out. And you can’t the start the Wild Card series the day after the regular season, as you need a buffer day to allow for tie-breakers, so the week following the end of the regular season would look like something like this.

Monday: Travel/Tie-Breakers
Tuesday: Wild Card Game 1
Wednesday: Wild Card Game 2
Thursday: Travel
Friday: Wild Card Game 3
Saturday: Travel
Sunday: Division Series Game 1

You could dump one of those two travel days by having the top-seeded Wild Card team host all three games in the series, but even with a Tuesday-Thursday series, you’d still be looking at starting the division series on Saturday, six days after the regular season ended. Right now, those series start on Thursday, so there isn’t a huge lull between the end of the regular season and the start of the playoffs. If you expand the Wild Card game into a Wild Card series, it’s going to be very difficult to avoid having the division winners sit around for a week after the season ends.

Now, that’s not a deal-breaker necessarily, and there are some additional benefits to having a three game Wild Card series. It would force teams to play that series like they play the rest of the year, not just stacking their rosters with relievers and pinch-runners and turning it into a contest with very different strategies than what the rest of the postseason calls for. As entertaining as the Wild Card games can be, they’re also a very different animal than any other game played all year long, and basing a team’s playoff chances on how well they can in a distorted version of a baseball game is a bit strange.

But it’s hard to see how MLB would manage to fit this expanded series into the current schedule. The World Series already runs into November this year, and the more you extend the postseason, the more likely it becomes that weather becomes a real problem. If you start regularly trying to play baseball games in the northern part of the country in November, you run very real chances of having big parts of the World Series repeatedly delayed or rained/snowed out, which isn’t good for anyone.

So if you expand the Wild Card game to a three game series, you might have to do it in conjunction with reducing the regular season back to a 154 game schedule. And while Commissioner Manfred has talked about considering that option, the money lost from removing 120 games — and 120 televised events — is going to make that a tough sell for profit-driven owners. And now the conversation is considerably more complex than just trying to come up with a more fair playoff system.

This particular outcome stinks for the Pirates and Cubs, no question, but it’s also a pretty rare occurrence. We’re not generally seeing a league’s three best records all come out of the same division, and it’s basically impossible to design a system that won’t occasionally throw up an unfortunate result. There is no perfect system that will make everyone happy in every situation. As long as the system mostly works, that’s probably the best you can do, and the current Wild Card system does seem to succeed at a pretty high rate.

If the owners were willing to take the financial hit related to shortening the regular season so that they could reasonably expand the Wild Card game to a three game series, that may be an idea worth considering, and I might even prefer that system to the one we have now. But I’m not the one who’d have to sacrifice significant income in order to make that happen, and even that change wouldn’t do anything about the fact that the Cubs and Pirates would have to play each other for the right to make the division series. So it’s more of a change than a solution, as there is no real obvious way to get around the problem of what happens when one division produces three excellent contenders.

A postseason tournament intentionally introduces inequity into the system. In this case, the Pirates and Cubs are going to be the most-harmed by the system’s inherent unfairness, but we’ve made a conscious decision to prefer unfair and exciting tournaments over rewarding the team with the best record at the end of the regular season. While that choice doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to fix inequities when possible, we should also be cognizant of the fact that this is an inevitable byproduct of setting up a tournament. And as long as we’re using the postseason to determine the season’s champion, situations like this are going to be inevitable.