The 2022 Regular Season Has Lacked Intensity
This is Chris’ first piece as a FanGraphs contributor. Chris is a data journalist based in Boston. He started his career working in baseball, first as a media relations intern with the 2014 Cubs and then with the Red Sox media relations department from 2015 to ’19. In addition to thinking about baseball, he reports on data topics ranging from education to climate to COVID-19 for U.S. News and World Report. Chris has long used FanGraphs to describe what data journalism is to confused friends and family.
The baseball fan’s proposition is a delicate balance. We’re asked to tune in for 162 games that are of relatively little individual importance to the team’s World Series chances, an act of faith anchored somewhat in the premise that “anything can happen” in the postseason. If your team is able to survive the regular season grind, the game assures you, they have a shot to bring home the ultimate reward.
But with less than three weeks to play, the 2022 regular season is looking a little flat from a competitive standpoint. The playoff field, with its new three Wild Card structure, is looking relatively set, and this year’s regular season is shaping up to have been, well, mild when it comes to non-home run chase drama.
After play on September 14, with three weeks left in the first regular season with six Wild Card slots up for grabs, there were 16 teams with a less than 10% chance of making the playoffs and another 10 with a chance of 90% or better, leaving just four teams – the Padres (82.3%), Guardians (81.6%), Brewers (21.4%), and White Sox (15.0%) – somewhere between despair and a near-certain postseason berth. That number was just five with a full four weeks left in the season. By comparison, with three weeks to go last year, eight teams fell between 10% and 90% in terms of playoff odds. In the last five full seasons, an average of seven teams have fallen in that range with three weeks to go.
With three Wild Cards in each league, you could imagine a September full of thrilling chases and surprise contenders. Instead, while playoff seeding is yet to be determined – most crucially, which team will come away with the NL East title and the first-round bye that’s likely to come with it – most teams are playing for home field advantage at best, and what essentially amounts to draft order at worst.
Part of the issue is the disparate nature of the haves and have-nots in the league today. FanGraphs projects four teams to win 100 games – the Dodgers already have – which would match the record set in 2019. A remarkable nine teams are projected to win fewer than 70, which would also be a record in a 162-game season. Part, of course, is chance. But the lack of stakes in an underwhelming playoff chase exacerbates the issue of a regular season already diluted in its importance thanks to a busier postseason bracket to work through at the end of the road.
To quantify what’s at stake in the regular season, we can look to Championship Leverage Index (cLI), a metric developed by Dave Studeman and Sky Andrecheck a little over 10 years ago and now hosted on Baseball Reference. cLI aims to measure the impact of a particular game on a team’s chances of winning the World Series by simulating season outcomes for each game outcome, with the baseline of 1.00 calibrated to represent an Opening Day game in the two Wild Card playoff format.
The more critical the game is to a team’s chances of winning the World Series, the higher the cLI value. When the Blue Jays hosted the Yankees in the final week of a Wild Card race last year, the September 30 series finale had a 2.74 cLI for Toronto and a 2.18 for the Yankees. The Yankees’ win that day raised their playoff chances from 84.2% to 97.0%, while Toronto’s loss dropped their odds from 22.9% to 13.5%; their World Series chances were impacted accordingly.
On the other hand, teams that know they won’t make the playoffs – as well as teams that are relatively certain of their playoff position – have less at stake on any given regular-season day. With extremely comfortable playoff positions, neither this year’s Dodgers nor Astros have played a game with a cLI higher than 1.00 since before the All-Star Break.
Between the new playoff format, which has drawn criticism for a number of reasons, and the way wins have been distributed this season, 2022 is shaping up to have featured the lowest-leverage average regular season game since the playoff format switched to a two Wild Card format in 2012. The average team-game this year has had a cLI of .68 (including games played on or before September 19), down almost 20% from the same point in last year’s season (.81). In the nine full seasons of the two Wild Card era, the average regular-season cLI through this point in the season ranged from .78 in 2019 to .93 in ’14.
Maybe these numbers are heating up as the season nears an end? Not this year. Through Monday, in each team’s last 20 team-games, the average cLI has been a paltry .43, thanks in part to the fact that only seven teams are averaging values over 1.00 during this stretch. Eleven teams were averaging over 1.00 during this stretch last year, when all teams averaged .60 over the 20-game period.
Looked at another way, 68.4% of the over 4,000 team-games played through Monday have had a cLI of less than 1.00, up from 55.5% in 2021, and 34.7% had a value of less than .50.
An imbalanced league and a dose of bad luck has meant that most fans have spent the final month of the season with their October plans made, but the cLI tells a story of a weakened regular season overall. Major League Baseball has spent years working on ways to cut down the time of an average game, but in the meantime, the expansion of the playoffs has contributed to an erosion of a more sacred asset: the value of a game.
Chris is a data journalist and FanGraphs contributor. Prior to his career in journalism, he worked in baseball media relations for the Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox.
Chris – welcome, and thanks for the great article!
I think the biggest issue with the 2022 races is that the top two seeds (which get the first round bye) have been pretty much wrapped up since well before the All-Star break. I don’t think the disparity between the haves and have nots is much more of a factor than in other recent seasons, but the way the divisional races have played out have made it so the only suspense would have been the battle for the #2 seed. Hopefully that comes into play in future seasons.
so going back and looking since 2015-
2015- AL would have top 2 set, NL battle for 2 seed.
2016- AL battle for top 2 seeds, NL would have been set.
2017- both would have been set
2018- AL would have top 2 set, NL battle for 2 seed
2019- AL battle for 2 seed, NL would have been set
2021- AL battle for 2 seed, NL would have been set
2022- both would have been set
so in 14 league years, would have had battle for 2 seed in 5 of those years. Other 9 top 2 seeds would have been set pretty easily. So this doesn’t seem to be all that out of the ordinary.
Were these regular seasons “intense”?
Braves are just 1 GB of the Mets for the 2 seed in the NL
I think as rightly pointed out in a later comment, intensity necessarily diminishes when there is a consolation prize in a Wild Card spot. As a well-known example, in 1993 the team with the second best record in the league (SF at 103-59) missed the playoffs by a game to the Braves (104-58). That will create more intensity than this year’s NL East showdown between two very good teams who are both playoff locks (albeit with seeding and a bye still on the line).
Not saying this is an argument in favor of having only one playoff team per division – I don’t know that anyone wants to return to that – just showing the tradeoffs involved between more playoff teams and the season-long intensity derived equation (or S.L.I.D.E.)
I think you are drastically under estimating the importance of the first round bye.
In less lop sided years, you’d have a lot of opportunities for meaningful games. Winning your division, having one of the top 2 division winner records, being the top seeded wild card, and making the playoffs at all are several layers of importance. Unfortunately this year there isn’t much
A way I’d like to see MLB add an extra flavor to make records matter is have the top seed in the wild card series get spotted a win similar to what they do in the KBO.
So like this year (as stands now), ATL vs SDP with ATL getting spotted a win; STL vs PHI with STL spotted a win.
The bye is very valuable and I think is an interesting question whether the fact that the opponent has to play multiple games is an advantage over the 1 game or not. With the 1 game playoff, the wild card teams would throw their best pitchers and therefore it was basically impossible for that guy to throw 2 games in the LDS without short rest.
Since the schedule now supports them playing 3 games, the guy who starts the first game of that series will be able to come back for the LDS and start 2 games. Considering the gap between a lot of teams’ best pitchers and the other guys, and the impact those guys can have on a series, I am not sure that I would trade the extra fatigue on the rest of the opponent’s pitching staff for having Jacob DeGrom be able to start twice against me again.
Now, in this condensed season where the LCS has lost an offday and they play games 3-7 consecutively again, I think its more likely to matter, much like the lack of offdays in 2020 mattered a lot and rewarded the teams who were built for depth (in the Dodgers and Rays) over their opponents. The Dodgers 3-1 comeback in 2020 was due in large part to the fatigue and overuse of the Atlanta bullpen, something that could easily happen again this year if someone plays 3 games in the wild card round, 5 games in the LDS, and then can’t get starter length in the LCS.
Its too bad that the lack of offdays is so hard on the players because I would really prefer it if the playoff structure more aligned with what is good teambuilding in the regular season – the way that it is sort of actively a poor idea to trade for a #5 starter at the deadline because that guy is only useful in the regular season and you do not want him to pitch in the playoffs is a bug in the MLB playoff format in my view – things that are good for winning in the regular season (like depth) should also be good for winning in the postseason. In the status quo, that hasn’t been the case, and teams like the 2019 Nationals can ride 50% of their own pitching staff to a title because of the playoff format.
I know people love the idea of the star pitchers being so influential in the postseason and the opportunity to see someone go Bumgarner on a series, but I think it would be better for baseball overall if there wasn’t such a large divide between “what wins regular season games” and “what wins playoff games”. It’s like if the NFL played its regular season with kickoffs and then in the playoffs all kickoffs were replaced my automatic touchbacks. Having a portion of your roster construction/team building decisions be devalued in playoff games is bad.
Oh no question the bye is huge and meaningful. But ‘getting a bye or not” still =/= not playing in the postseason at all, intensity-wise.
Sure, but that limits the number of playoff races.
I’d rather have intrigue with multiple layers vs “well 2 out of 15 teams give a shit about this, but they care a lot.”
Being a Guardians fan in the AL Central (which shielded me from the worst of this, since our race only really became one-sided this week), I haven’t felt this at all. I guess it really is down to fandom; which teams have had the most and least exciting seasons.
Astros fans have probably been a bit bored.
As an Astros fan, I will say this has been a nice, relaxing season. Get to sit back and just enjoy the game for the game. The only annoyance has been other Astros fans who want the Astros to trade away young starting pitchers that have been enjoyable to watch.
You’re not annoyed that as the #1 seed, both of your potential opponents, the #4 and #5 seed, have better records than both of the #3 and #6 seeds? (At least the Guardians’ recent winning streak has made this less true, since they’re about tied with the #5 seed Rays now.)
One of the annoying things about this playoff format is that it makes is better to be the #2 seed in a lot of cases – with the old system, yes, something the two wild cards (#4 and #5) were both better than #3, but at least they’d be playing an extra winner take all game to waste their ace, whereas #3 wouldn’t.
The 3-6 seeds are projected to win between 88-92 games. I’m not sure which teams will have the best regular season record, and I’m not sure which team is better suited for the postseason.
Though considering the 4 and 5 seeds have to win 2 games instead of just 1, the winner of the series will likely be in a weaker position than in the old system. Maybe this system helps the No. 2 seed more, but being the one seed is probably the same or slightly better in the new system than being the one in the old system.
I don’t like the 3rd division winner by default getting the 3rd seed, but there isn’t a wild card team that has separated themselves from Cleveland this year.
I would like to see the #1 seed get to choose their opponent after the wild card series finish. I don’t think it will happen but it would really incent grabbing that top seed, plus second guessing their choice (particularly if it didn’t work out) would fill the bulletin board grist mill for days.
That is dangerous.
Playoffs are a crapshoot and any team that gets hot for a week can beat anybody. Plus there’s the “bulletin board” factor.
Best not give the other guys any extra motivation.
I think the third division winner getting the 3rd seed is appropriate, as it incentives winning the division even if you don’t get a first round bye.
Most notably, if two teams are fighting for the division title but only have the 5th and 6th best records in the league, it gives meaning to that divisional race to fight for the #3 seed and therefore home field advantage in the first round.
This same thing is true in the NL and I do think the seeding is jacked up – the normal way to seed a tournament is to give the high-low mix to the higher seed. The 3v6 should play the 1 and the 4v5 should play the 2. The Dodgers face this problem – the Cardinals/6 seed is a much weaker matchup than MetsorBraves/Padres. I think its going to consistently be the case that at least one and often 2 wild card teams are better than the 3rd division winner. The #1 seed should get the 3v6 matchup because they’re the top seed. That’s how bracketing usually works, and it will reliably be the weaker opponent and thats what they should draw.
I think the NHL playoffs reseed after the first round so the top seed can play the lowest remaining seed if I’m not mistaken?
At any rate both sports should consider reseeding by wins rather than by seed. So LAD could play the team with the lowest remaining number of wins.
That would be fine but even if you aren’t reseeding, the matchup with the wider spread of seeds should be on the top of the bracket with the #1 vs (#8 aka bye) slot
I’m a Dodgers fan and I will say I enjoyed 17, 19, 20 and 22 much more than I enjoyed 18 and 21. The playoffs are stressful and frustrating enough. A nice relaxing romp of dominance is much more enjoyable than a stressful race.
When your team is very, very good, the downside is just much higher than the upside (because success is expected, and failure therefore hurts a lot more) and the further you can stay away from it until the playoff crapshoot begins, the better experience you’re likely to have.
The Dodgers are 104-46 and I spent most of tonight annoyed that they had played such shit baseball for the last 3 days or so against the Diamondbacks. The burden of expectations is high.
As a White Sox fan, the only tension has been waiting to see if the team could pull their collective heads out of their asses. The answer was decidedly “no” by late August, and then only became “maybe” for a few weeks after TLR went on the IL.
There has been far, far, far more frustration than tension.
I feel this!
I really don’t think the problem with the ChiSox is down to the individual players. They’re hustling out there. The problem is that the coaching staff and front office have done a shitty job this year. Their defensive positioning has been inefficient all year, and the front office has made some very weird moves. Tony LaRussa’s existence doesn’t help matters. Miguel Cairo can only do so much with a fractured foundation.
Very interesting data presented and it seems to mirror my interest level lately. I’m tuning in to watch deGrom, Verlander, Ohtani, Pujols, Judge, etc more than I am to see teams fight for playoff positions. I really miss those battles, like when Tampa walked off on NYY to get in the playoffs in game 162 back in 2011.
The Braves and Red Sox had epic collapses that year. The Cardinals made the playoffs by the skin of their teeth. It would be more dramatic to see the Brewers, Phillies and Padres battle for 1 spot instead of 2
This is true, but it’s even better to have proper Best-of-3 first round instead of that lame play-in game.
We’ll see how the bye teams handle the layoff
I remember watching that Rays walk off in a bar in Providence RI and it was hilarious
baseball is dying
Its just you
Speaking as a Braves fan… I know us and Mets fans are both feeling a good bit of intensity. Tune into that September 30th-October 2nd series and I think you’ll see two teams playing with intensity.
I think that’s gonna depend on this next week. Especially if Braves fall a bit further behind entering the series.
How much intensity? Each team might want to save something for the WC round if they have to play it. It’s not an all out fight for survival
eh I don’t know. I mean the way the playoff schedule is- both teams want to win the title right? Well the WC team to be able to use their #1 starter in game 5 of the LDS would have to use him on short rest in either game 1 or game 5 of the LDS. With the Mets and Max or deGrom- that’s not happening with their health. Same realistically with Braves and Fried.
Yes it’s preferable to win but they can’t go all out and empty the bench, use Scherzer and Fried in relief and the stuff they’d do if it were a matter of survival. Every game in the past 2 months would have had playoff intensity if survival were at stake
Why wouldn’t they? “Oh well, we’re down by 1 in the 11th, guess I’ll just use our 5th best reliever instead of an ace and hope we don’t lose 2/3 vs another good team. Good thing we save our ace though” doesn’t seem like a great strategy.
Not only that, but it’s not the last series of the year. ATL has 3 at the Marlins while the Mets host the Nats for 3.
The bye is enormous. Don’t have to worry about losing 2/3 vs another good team (coin flip basically) and you get to rest your starters.
Getting a first round bye is huge.
Braves-Mets is the only playoff battle with any sort of excitement right now.
The more teams in the playoffs the less intense the regular season will necessarily be. It’s not the same to watch the Braves and Mets battle out the division with the loser going home as it is to have the loser get a 3 game series with the Padres or Phillies.
The Padres – Phillies – Brewers race to eliminate the 7th place team isn’t that compelling to a neutral fan because most people don’t care who’s #6 and who’s #7. Any of the three has the ability to win a short series so the actual importance is probably more than the elimination narrative.
I like the idea of a split-season format. Qualify for the playoffs in either half, with incentives for qualifying in both halves. Resetting records to 0-0 after the All-Star break would mean that marginal teams aren’t doomed after a bad April and good teams can’t coast from mid-June onwards.
No thanks, downvote
1981 already proved why that’s a bad idea, as there were multiple teams that had their division’s best overall record but missed the playoffs completely (which was even expanded to 8 teams that year) just because they didn’t finish with their division’s best first or second half record.
So there’s one close race of consequence (NL East), with the other divisions and wild cards mostly set and the NL WC being decided based on who is least pathetic this month than anything else.
The centrals have a grand total of 2 teams that are even 10 or more games over .500, and this is likely due to the imbalanced schedule more than anything, unless you truly believe that the Guardians and their +45 run diff are a team that should be 15 over .500 if they were playing in any of the not-awful divisions. And before anyone says “the Brewers are 9 games over, stop cherry-picking,” their +25 run diff is even more uninspiring.
Aside from the imbalance issue you mentioned, even some of the .500-ish teams (Brewers, ChiSox, Twins) are only making it there by feasting on even worse divisional opponents. This is a competition problem, and the bulk of it is concentrated in the thoroughly mediocre central divisions.
This comment gets awfully close to the problem, IMO. At least partly because of the sheer number of playoff seeds but also due to just utter mediocrity that would be an issue in every year, there are a whole lot of teams that are stumbling into the playoffs and are only there because everyone else is more pathetic. Consider:
-The Yankees practically locked up the division in the first half of the season and have been terrible in the second half.
-The Guardians won the division by default because no one showed up.
-The Cardinals have been shut out in each of their last three games, winning one four games ago by scoring exactly one run. But because the Brewers’ house of cards finally toppled, they still have a 99% chance of winning the division.
-The Phillies, Padres, and Mariners have been doing everything in their power to lose the wild card races but the Brewers and Orioles just don’t have enough in the tank to make them pay for it.
Some of these things would have been a problem in any year, some are made worse by the new wild card format. But it’s bad.
Mariners – Blue Jays – Rays battling for 1 spot would have a bit more intensity
Its already pretty dang good. Just watch the games. Each one is good.
Since Sept 4th, the Guardians have gone 14-3 and more than half of those wins were vs the Twin and White Sox. There was no “default”. They went out and took it. Id argue that nothing going on has been bad. I’ve enjoyed the Mariners all year long, but it’s just a long grind of a season.
They “took it” from 2 bad teams. That is “by default,” someone has to make it from the AL Central. Because of the imbalanced schedule, someone in a 5 team div will end up over .500, and the Guardians are this year’s winner.
Guardians are grabbing and winning the division. It isn’t by default. You’re right that none of the three is particularly impressive record wise so it’s not that compelling
Cleveland isn’t going to win 100 games but 90 is likely. That is not a bad team in any division.
29-17 in one run games.
12-4 in extra innings.
12-8 vs the NL.
The beat the expert picks.
Even today with 98% playoff chances they’re only rated #12 by rankers.
But everybody forgets, today’s roster isn’t April or May’s.
Today they have an OF.
McKenzie is coming into his own.
Bieber is fully recovered from 2021 injury.
The bullpen has jelled into the best in the league, top to bottom.
Lowest strikeouts in the league. First in baserunning and infield hits.
And they’re doing it with the youngest roster, 20 rookies, and only two players above 30, neither a key player.
They’re kids too dumb to know (or care) they’re not supposed to win.
So go ahead and take them lightly.
We’ll see how they do in the playoffs and next season.
This is the first year ever for a 6th playoff spot, i dont think anybody’s really lamenting that none of the teams vying for that spot are dominating the league. I’m sure there have been years when a 5th seed lit the playoffs up (since there’s never yet been a 6th seed), but i can’t say i really remember one.
The 6-team playoff schedule did NOT expand the number of teams trying to compete, this year. But I think it was a good step.
How is it a good step if no one cares enough to compete for it?
Maybe games are not easy to win, even when you try your best? This is the big league we are talkin’ about here.
It seems like it’s time for an updated look at payroll vs. wins. The league nibbles around the edges of its competitive imbalance problem with draft picks, limited revenue sharing, and imbalanced scheduling (that it’s rolling back). Would more revenue sharing lead to tighter races and a higher-leverage regular season?
Only if you assume the money gets spent and not pocketed or “diverted” to things that have no appreciable effect on the outcome of baseball games.
Okay sure. Decompose it into two questions: Would more revenue sharing lead to more equal payrolls? (Yes, if the system is properly constructed?) Would more equal payrolls lead to tighter races? (Yes?)
Lots of owners and general managers just arent particularly interested in spending to compete. MLB teams receive approximately $110M/ year from revenue sharing and the Pirates payroll is ~36M. The acceptability of a Big Tank TM strategy has only allowed owners to run low payrolls and GMs to keep their jobs for longer while not paying to compete.
Hence the need for a properly designed system. E.g.:
https://blogs.fangraphs.com/mlbs-competitive-balance-tax-is-anything-but/
This is by the far the most frustrating part of MLB to me. I think it might be hard to create a worse system than the current one. Profit sharing should have components that force spending the money that the team gets from profit sharing. Winning baseball games should be profitable, and losing games less profitable as well… this isnt a hard concept.
There are currently 11 teams that have less than 70 wins with 2 weeks left in the season… that is terrible for the MLB brand. Only 4-5 teams in the entire league who made a conscious effort to be competitive this year wont make the playoffs. And lots of teams at the bottom are going to have much better profit margins (not actual profits, but margins) than the best built and ran teams.
Most teams do spend their revenue sharing money properly. It’s just that not all of it shows up directly on the Major League payroll. Teams have a lot of other expenditures, too.
Pretty sure revenue sharing money isnt supposed to cover all costs for a team. And if each team is getting $110 million, there are at least four pocketing some of that money as profit, and 8 teams well off that number.
Im all about teams making money that are doing a good job producing an entertaining product… teams that dont should lose money, not run $65 million payrolls and guarantee themselves a winning year financially (looking at you Pittsburgh!)
Not all costs, but it can be spent however a team wants. Nowhere does it say that all of it must be spent on the Major League payroll.
Like I said, when you total all the expenditures a team makes, including what fjtorres pointed out, it runs well over $110M for every single team each year. Some teams also have stadium debts they’re still paying off. They spend what they can on the Major League payroll with what they have left, revenue sharing money included.
Meanwhile, baseball is a business, so every team has the right to make a decent profit every year as long as they aren’t going overboard at the expense of the overall health of the franchise. You can’t force a team to lose money just so that they can win a few more games each year.
Some teams put it to the farm, coaching, analytics.
Not everybody throws money at last year’s good player turning 32.
Not a good year.
Not if the WS turns out to be LA vs Cleveland. 😂
Playoffs=crapshoot.
The Pujols thing is cringe to me (and I am a Cardinals fan). I’ve tuned out this season completely, apart from Fangraphs.
I hate everything the commissioner is doing to the sport. It is fast becoming the NBA.
One thing that I think we can lay to rest are all the things about how having more wild card teams will make the regular season more competitive, because more teams will try to sign free agents and fewer teams will be tearing down.
Well, part of it came true. Teams that might have completely ripped up the team in the offseason like the Reds and Cubs tried to take a more balanced approach, and teams like the Tigers, Rockies, Rangers, Marlins, and Twins made moves that they might not have otherwise. And at the deadline there were a lot fewer sellers than usual.
But this just didn’t have much of an effect on the outcome. Aside from the Twins, none of these teams even came close to making some noise. It turns out that many of those teams were just bad enough that it didn’t matter, which is something we probably should have predicted because the return on free agency is comically low. Maybe there will be longer-term effects because fewer teams will do teardowns in the future but I wouldn’t count on it. The best way to build a winner remains (1) finding a critical mass of young talent and then (2) supplementing that core with veterans. That isn’t changing.
One thing to note, next year will be probably a bit more parity with the divisions with 24 fewer divisional games. That will make for better races for the top seeds I think.
Thia is a dumb article, no offense. Just my opinion. If you thought the games lacked intensity, I think one should look toward their own depression. Each game has plenty enough intensity. Even the Oakland A’s are playing hard until the finish line.
Well, duh. They’re still professional baseball players who want to win, and a lot of them are playing for jobs going forward.
Nice article. The Guardians White Sox the last 2 nights were fun to watch. The Sox will they won’t they has been a season long story that played out til last night. And the AL MVP Cy Young races have kept me riveted. And Mets Braves still are battling for the NL east. The seeding and byes are at least better than the NBA where you have teams throwing games toward the end to get a lower seed and better matchup.
This was always going to happen with so many playoff teams. It’s nearly impossible try and build a contender and not make the playoffs.
Take the AL – with 1 WC Jays have lead with 2.5 games ahead and 2 teams chasing.
2 WC – Jays are fairly secure, Rays .5 up on Sea.
Current system- no competition beyond seeding.
I’ve watched less regular season baseball because what’s the point? Nothing matters till playoffs and there was never a legit threat the Jays would miss out on playoffs.
I dunno, watching the Jays sleepwalk through some of those earlier series with the fast-closing Orioles had me shook for a while
The thing is, playoff $$$ is where its at. Sure fans may be less interested in the regular season because who cares Jays Mariners Rays all get in. But the fact that 3 teams get to play in playoff series vs 1 is the big selling point to owners
Welcome. In my view, your article is an excellent beginning. It addresses a question that is important, but hasn’t been addressed this season, nor most seasons, on Fangraphs (as far as I can remember.) In addition, it includes a metric that is rarely, if ever, discussed. A novel contribution which is pretty challenging in this environment.
What would be interesting is to go back several years, assume that all games were decided just as they were, but applying the different playoff formats, i.e., 1 WC, 2 WC and the 3 WC format. I agree that teams would make decisions differently if the playoff format was different at the time. However, it would be interesting to see if the metric consistently favors one playoff format over another using cLi as the metric.
I wonder if part of this isn’t that teams were built optimized for the previous playoff/draft pick format, not the current one. Teams barely had any time to adjust their strategy to the new format. The real test of the new format will come over the next couple years.
E.g., if the ‘optimal’ strategy under the old format was for 15 teams at a time to make a real effort while the other 15 tank, and maybe under the new format the ‘optimal’ strategy is for 23 teams to make an effort. Teams can’t immediately pivot from ‘tanking’ to ‘competing.’ In the meantime, we’re stuck with 15 teams competing for 12 playoff spots, which is not exciting. But hopefully things start to look different after a few offseasons?
The only tanking teams I can think of are the Reds, A’s and maybe Cubs. Nationals and Pirates never had a chance. Rangers, Rockies, Angels, Giants, Red Sox, Tigers and maybe Royals tried to contend but failed. Diamondbacks and Orioles seem to have turned a corner. It might just be that the extra 8 teams who try to contend will always be outgunned
Even the Cubs signed Stroman and Suzuki.
I was never in favor of playoff expansion and I think a lot of the lack of intensity is directly due to the additional playoff spot. Imagine how much more intense it would be if Toronto/Seattle/Tampa were competing for 2 spots. Baltimore would still be on same fringe as well. Same goes in the NL, where only 1 of San Diego and Philly would make it.
It was never really going to encourage more teams to “go for it.” All the 6th spot was ever going to do was water down the competition, which is the exact result we’ve gotten.
I think part of the story is that with the expanded playoffs, making the postseason has been greatly reduced in significance. For me, the teams like the Phillies and Brewers who are trying to sneak into the playoffs are just not interesting to watch. Is any general baseball fan interested whether some not-so-great teams will win the right to lose to some significantly better teams?
It has also reduced the drama associated with the best teams. It was a foregone conclusion since the beginning of the year that the Dodgers, Yankees, and Astros would make the playoffs. It’s just a question of what seed they would be. That’s boring.
I suspect MLB is less interested in trying to create drama/excitement for fans of the best teams, but for fans of the teams that have the misfortune to share a division with the mega-teams.
If knowing that your team is making the playoffs for sure is boring, imagine how much fun it is knowing your team won’t make it for sure.
I hear you and that probably worked, but what I took from the premise of the article is that the races in general lack intensity. I’m sure the Phillies and Brewers fans are more interested right now than they would be in the previous format, but my argument is that to the general baseball fan these races lack the significance they previously would’ve because most fans don’t care who the 6th seed is to get into the playoffs. And they already know the best teams are in. Even if someone loses the Division they have a soft landing with the wild card.
Standards here have really lowered. This was one of my least favorite articles in a long time. Hopefully the writer gets better from here.
This shouldn’t be glossed over: 9 teams are projected to win less than 70 games. 9 out of 30. Thats 30%. Or, to put it in baseball terms, you have the same odds as a baseball fan of watching a team that’s a total non factor in the baseball season as a .300 hitter has of getting a hit. Essentially, as often as Trea Turner or Yordan Alvarez gets a hits, that’s as often as fans have 0 reason to care even a little bit about the 2022 season.
Baseball isn’t dying. But it’s morphed into largely a regional game where a handful of major cities pay attention every year, with a rotating cast of smaller cities joining the fun sporadically, while 1/3 of the league is just not a thing worth looking at. And that IS killing generations of fans in those smaller cities/out of it franchises who just have no reason to care at all.
I’d raise an argument that I’ve raised before but wasn’t mentioned here: expanding the post-season just downshifts the races further in the standings. Sometimes that will mean there are a bunch of teams clumped up in the right spot. Sometimes it will put the whole clump into the playoffs by moving the threshold below them. It will vary from season to season. It doesn’t inherently create more races and excitement, and it doesn’t also inherently make less of them – it simply causes the race to be between, say, the 5th-8th teams in a league instead of the 4th-6th or whatever. Depending how the league is stratified, that may or may not create more close races.
The downside to this, in my view, is that it transfers the stakes to teams less likely to be able to live up to them. The ‘races’ between the Guardians / rest of their division and the Padres/Phillies/Brewers have been fairly bland in part because those teams just haven’t been exciting. The Twins, White Sox, Brewers, and Padres are all various degrees of disappointment relative to expectations.
A lot of people think of last year’s Dodgers/Giants divisional race as a great one, and to the extent that it was one it was because both teams were playing *great* and won all the time; if either fell off, the other would surely capitalize. This year we’ve had a bunch of ‘races’ where both teams fall off and neither capitalizes and instead they just muddle their way through. Now, from my perspective as a Dodger fan, I didn’t think the Giants/Dodgers race was *that* exciting because of the timing – the Giants almost always played first (they start their games 30 minutes earlier, and they had more east coast games remaining at the end of the year) and since both teams always won, it constantly meant that the Dodgers just had to win to hold serve, which they would do, but the opportunity to gain was almost nonexistent – I’d think of an exciting race as a back and forth one, not one where the teams are 1-2 games apart and then just win in tandem almost all the time, which is what happened. But it remains true that there was tension, because if either faltered, the other would capitalize.
Fears of the Brewers capitalizing on the Padres doldrums never seemed to exist and definitely did not materialize. Both teams are just kind of eh. In this particular season, the 2-wildcard setup would have produced better races (between Seattle, Tampa and Toronto, and between the Phillies and Padres for just one spot). But in other seasons it will go the other way.
The cost to the quality of races for playoff spots isn’t in occurance – that will vary from year to year. It’s in the lower quality of team involved in them, and therefore the increasing probability that, like this year, they’re not decided by exceptional performances but by universally unexceptional ones.
Last year the Dodgers and Giants won all the time on the same days so the Dodgers could never make up ground. This year the Brewers and Padres have tried losing all the time on the same days so the Brewers never make up ground. As it turns out, having the win be the default state is more interesting.