The Second Wildcard Spot and the Unquantifiable Element
Not long ago, it looked like the As were running away with the 2014 American League West. Things have changed. After Sunday night’s game, the Angels are in first place by one game and the As are the first wildcard team at the moment. Whichever team ends up winning the division, barring a shocking twist, the other team will be a very tough matchup for the second wildcard team.
The prospect of facing such a particularly tough opponent in the wildcard game might lead some to think that the second wildcard spot is not all that valuable this season. Not only is the opponent likely to be very good (arguably better than the other division winners), but they will be playing at home. The second wildcard gives a team a chance at advancing, but it does not look like a very good chance. This is probably true most seasons, but it seems particularly clear this year.
Taking that all into account, the question arises as to how much value teams should place on that second wildcard spot. Sure, any team would take that spot over not making the playoffs, but should it really alter a team’s plans with regard to the future budget, trading away prospects, or making other “win now” moves? Is this something that can be quantified?
The wildcard game is often called the “coin flip game” for good reason. No matter what the matchup is, the nature of randomness over a single game (not as if five or seven games is a big sample, either) makes it a virtual, uh, coin flip.
Of course, it is not really a 50-50 proposition. The better team can be expected to win. It might be tough sometimes figuring out which team is more talented, but we have tools that can help us get a pretty good idea more often than not. The current season’s record is not a very good way to go about it. However, at issue here is not specific projections, but a general point about what it means to make the wildcard game. Taking examples from teams that might be in the wildcard game this season, we have a pretty good idea that Oakland (.589 winning percentage so far this season) is better than Seattle (.550).
For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume that Oakland and Seattle are true talent .589 and .550 teams, respectively.The Log5 method is a commonly accepted way of figuring out what a team’s chances to win. Because the point of this post is not precision and I like simplicity, let’s use the straight-line simpliciation of log5 as formulated by Tom Tippett, where Team A’s chance of beating Team B are:
.500 + (Team A Winning Percentage) – (Team B Winning Percentage)
Using Seattle (.550) as Team A and Oakland (.589) as Team B, this gives Seattle a .461 winning percentage. That is not great. If one wanted to give it an optimistic slant, one could note that it .46 rounds up to .5. Coin flip game!
There is another factor, though — not only does the second wildcard get a tough opponent this season, but the game will be played in the first wildcard’s home park. Without getting into all the discussions regarding home field advantage, let’s just stipulate that the home team wins 54 percent of the time (see Jeff Sullivan’s discussion from last season).
Taking that into account, the Mariners’ chances would be:
.460 + .550 – .489 = .421
There goes rounding up to .500! A .421 team over 162 games would be a 68-94 team, no one’s idea of a good record.
But again, lousy teams beat good teams all the time. Indeed, last year’s Mariners, who finished the season with a .438 winning percentage, actually won their regular season series against the .593 As, 11-8 (.579). A four-in-10 chance is not quite a coin flip, but it is not a one-in-10 chance, either.
Still, this is not a “just go for it” speech or an existential reflection on the difference between four and one. We pretty much already know that a .550 team on the road against a .589 team is at a real disadvantage, the calculations just throw it into relief. The question was whether or not it was worth it for a team to make plans around making the second wildcard spot. Put another way: how do we judge a team’s attempt to contend if their likely destination is a one-game playoff on the road against a quite superior team?
One could look and check not only the odds of winning the playoffs, but the chances of getting to successive rounds. Projections already do that, of course. A broader approach might use social scientific data to see how much more fan interest would be generated for the team given even a one game playoff loss (and, naturally, how much more interest there might be if the team advances). This fan interest would, presumably, lead to more money for the team, which could be used to fund future payrolls. One can imagine other ways to calculate the value of going for the second wildcard spot based on probabilities and benefits.
These factors are relevant. The point is not to dismiss numbers or the business end of baseball. But I am reminded of a post I was writing years ago when I was first blogging. It was about a great player who was on a big contract. My initial conclusion was that despite the player’s greatness, his trade value was extremely limited because of that contact. When discussing my idea with Dave Cameron, he suggested that I should mitigate my conclusion. Even though the contract and the player’s projected value meant that he offered little direct surplus value, the player was so good that he could help a contender win championships in the right situation. And that is the point — to win games. If the point was simply to accrue surplus value, “every team should try to be the Marlins,” as Dave put it (not an exact quote, but that was the gist).
Of course, teams should try to accrue surplus value when they can. Getting the most talent for the money is a good way to go about winning games. But surplus value is not an end in itself. While no one denies that profession baseball is a business and very few expect teams and owners to take foolish losses, but the point is to win.
Most of us probably think that in the context of major league baseball, “winning” finally means winning championships. We do not expect teams to go “all in” in an effort to win 73 games instead of 68. But if winning the World Series is the point, then there is a difference in kind between, for example, winning 87 games and not making the playoffs and winning 89, going on the road to the West Coast and at least having a shot.
Does this justify doing anything and everything, trading away key future prospects for a one-year shot and/or giving foolish contracts based on a chance to get into the playoffs, wherein the team will have a small chance to advance at all, much less get to and win the World Series? Obviously, it does not justify doing just anything for some small shot. Various factors, present and future, should be taken into account. Data must be sifted and choices must be made based on data and projections that are known to be fallible.
But without sentimentality, if we accept that the point of (even?) professional baseball is to try and win, then deciding at what point it is worth it to go for it, even if “it” is the second wild card spot, cannot just be boiled down to an algorithm. Perhaps that line should be a 55 percent chance to have a 42 percent chance to win the wildcard game. Maybe the line should be drawn at a 35 percent chance to make it. This is not to say that the line is drawn in an arbitrary faction. But whatever calculations inform the decision, an unquantifiable element is present.
Matt Klaassen reads and writes obituaries in the Greater Toronto Area. If you can't get enough of him, follow him on Twitter.
Both the Tigers and A’s have lost their big leads, I wonder if the Orioles will follow suit after being swept by the Cubs.
Naw. Have you seen us? We turrible.
Going for a second wild card spot isn’t worth it to give up prospects, but right now a team like the tigers who already know they are good enough should probably make a move to get that second spot.
If the AL West runner-up loses that play-in game, you can expect all sorts of proposals to change the current structure. Being one of the top couple of teams in all of baseball should be rewarded with more than a single game play-in.
Probably the thing to do is to keep the two-wild-card structure, but make the play-in game between the teams with the two worst records, whether they were wild cards or division champs. That seems a lot more fair.
what about a 3 game series?
of course, that pushes back the division series.
A division winner should not be put into a coin-flip game. You win your division, you get a 5-game series, at very least.
The whole prospect of being forced into the Wild Card Game is what makes the pennant race between Oakland and L.A. interesting. It’s the only good that has come from the new 10-team playoff format, as you don’t have the Yankees and Red Sox coasting into the playoffs anymore because they know they’re both safe.
The problem there is that the Yankees and Red Sox where often the 2 best teams in the game and they gave us GREAT postseason baseball in those 7-game ALCSes.
Now the system we have gives one team about a 40% chance of losing the wild-card game, and even if they do make it out of that round, you have the two best teams in game playing each other in a 5-game series, rather than potentially a 7-game series.
The AL-west race is nice, but it doesn’t get the national attention the playoffs do. Plus, there is still value in fighting for home field, so neither team would give up if the old system was still in place.
You’re neglecting the fact that some of the best postseason baseball isn’t the two best teams, if that was the goal you’d just give the best teams byes to the ALCS. The prototypical Yankees v. Red Sox matchup isn’t an interesting one – we’ve seen it before. Underdogs match-ups are incredibly fun to watch. The whole beauty of October is how unpredictable it is, and the new format only adds to that beauty.
It would be even more unpredictable if all “series” were one game, winner take all.
And if you want underdog matchups, why not put all teams in the playoffs in a 1-30 seed system?
It’s pretty easy to exaggerate someone’s words to the point of absurdity and that’s more or less what you did with the bye to the LCS comment.
Feel free to try again.
Think if the O’s skate to the ALDS with a worse record than EITHER of the AL wild cards….
Both the Tigers, Royals and the M’s are expected to be just 1-1.5 games back of the O’s at the end of the season. Its not hard to imagine a scenario where the division winning O’s are actually the 5th best record in the league, with the 2nd best and 4th best record going to the WC game. Seems kind of odd to have a system in place that allows that to happen. I like your idea keeping the who gets into the playoff structure the same, but have the seeding done by record. People will bring up the unbalanced record, but honestly, it isn’t that strong of a force compared to potentially putting the arguably best team in baseball in the 1 game playoff just because the other arguably best team in baseball happens to be in the same division.
On a broader note, its doesn’t seem to be in the best interest of baseball to have system with a very real possibility that one of the top two teams in the league are gone from the playoffs after just one game. To me that seems to cheapen the brand and that most fans, especially after losing a rooting interest in their home team, want to see the best teams go deep in the playoffs, and if an underdog is going to win its not by lucking out in a single game. I get that this system gives winning the division more meaning, but the cost is making the winner of the post-season seem like the outcome of several rolls of the dice rather than real talent carrying the day.
Well what you ask for is how it used to be until 1968, the league champs advanced, period. But we won’t go back to that because of $$$ and probably most fans don’t want to go back. I do hope the playoffs don’t get watered down any further though.
As long as there are divisions, there are going to be years when a division leader has a worse record than a wild card team (and as long as that happens there will be people whining incessantly about it).
If you want to ensure that doesn’t happen, you have two real choices: get rid of wild card teams, or get rid of divisions. (And if you want to get rid of divisions, great; but you also have to get rid of time zones because that’s one of the primary reasons the divisions exist).
joser, that’s a false choice, at least of sorts.
There are lots of options for system to have an arbitrary number of “best” teams all be seeded in the playoffs according to their finish relative to other top teams. Much of the problem now is that division are pretty small and we don’t have an even number of them. So things don’t jive well going into a base-2 tournament structure and chances division winners aren’t particularly good, go up with more divisions per number of teams in the league.
The time zone issue is one built out of current system, not hard coded into the nature competitive sports spanning multiple time zone. For instance, we could just have two divisions, East and West in each league. That will mean everything going forward will be multiples of 2, which is much easier to deal with in a tournament structure than multiples of 3. Balanced schedules in 4 groups is preferable to 6.
Then you can dream up several systems that let similar numbers or teams into the playoffs without resorting to a 1-game series in a random event driven sport like baseball.
For example, I’d support division winners get home field advantage against the second place team from the other division. All series are 7 games, with no off days that aren’t travel days. It seems hard to argue that would give the best 2 teams a fair shake in the deal even if they are in the same division. The east winner might be worse than the west 2nd place team, but in this system that doesn’t matter that much. In our current system that matters a lot. So lets not let the perfect get in the way of the good.
Actually, if you want to get serious about proposals I’d do that one better and have ZERO divisions in each league. You’d still have the unbalanced schedule for timezone reasons, but only for timezone reasons (so for example the Rangers would play more games against the White Sox and Royals than against the A’s and Mariners, though not as many games as in-division foes have now).
And then for the playoffs you take the top four from each league and assign home field to the top two and have the bottom two play them per the usual 1-4 / 2-3 seeding. Or, if MLB is wedded to spreading excitement by keeping as many cities in the race as late as possible, you could take the top five and force #4 and #5 to have a play-in first.
Not to mention, we could have the best record in baseball being “rewarded” by facing the team with the second or third best record, in the divisional playoffs.
Honestly I’d just scrap divisions altogether. Just put them in two leagues. The NBA manages just fine with divisions deciding nothing.
I don’t think forcing a division winner into a one-game playoff is the answer – the current system is designed to make winning your division matter, and the fans by and large seem to like that improvement. Maybe eliminating the second wild card if the first wild card winner beats them by at least 5 or 10 games is an answer, if an answer needs to exist.
“the current system is designed to make winning your division matter”
That’s the problem.
It’s only fair with an unbalanced schedule. Teams like Oakland and California get to feast on the Rangers and the Astros which should lead to inflated records. It wouldn’t be fair to compare their win-loss records to say a team that has to play 3 decent teams and the defending world champs in their division.
Well, to you that’s a problem. Lots of people don’t share that opinion.
“Teams like Oakland and California get to feast on the Rangers and the Astros”
…but also have more games against ANA/OAK and SEA, some of the better (best) teams in the American League.
And these things tend to be cyclical. The AL East was fairly beastly for years, now it’s the home of the Orioles and four also-rans (at least this year). I would caution against making wholesale changes to scheduling based on one year’s (any year’s) results.
People also forget that the Mariners do significantly better on the road versus at home, so playing a play-in game to be the wild card team would favor Seattle more as the #5 team as opposed to the #4 team. Ideally as a Mariners fan, I would like to see them either win the division or go in as the 2nd wild card team and play the Angels in Anaheim with Felix on the mound.
Felix >>>>>>>>> Weaver/Wilson/homeless #3 starter/Santiago/Shoemaker
But, as has been pointed out hundreds of times before, if you’re racing to get the 2nd wild card, you will likely be needing Felix down the stretch and can’t coast in and set up your rotation to have Felix in the WC Game when you’re doing everything possible to hold off DET/KC/others.
I see a lot of people express this sentiment like it’s obvious on its face: “being one of the top teams in all of baseball should be rewarded with more than a single game play-in, to make it more ‘fair.'”
I don’t get this at all, and think it’s far from obvious. There’s a competition that takes place between every team in baseball and there’s a competition that takes place between the teams in the direct division. Personally, I think this makes things a lot more interesting, and one of the things that makes the NBA regular season, with its meaningless divisions, more boring. If you lose the competition to win your division, how is it somehow “unfair” that you have to win a 1-game play-in? That’s the kind of thing that makes sports fun and interesting, because it increases the importance of the intra-division competition. I don’t understand why people think there’s something wrong with this or “unfair.” You don’t want to play that game, you need to win more games than your direct competitors. If you don’t, you have to face Felix Hernandez in a 1-game playoff. Boo-hoo.
I also don’t think the A’s or Angels are much better than, say, the Mariners, who are the current most likely 3rd team involved in AL wildcard/AL west race.
What chance would you give the Mariners with Felix vs the Angels and whoever is deemed to be their best starter?
I was thinking this too, seems like Felix Hernandez is a pretty good equalizer against whatever #1 either the A’s or Angels choose, but Seattle might be in a dog fight for #2 wild card and have to spend Felix before the one-game playoff just to get into said playoff. But then, maybe the A’s and Angels take it right to the wire to avoid the play-in game and they also don’t have their #1 and #2 available. Should be fun to watch it play out.
Kuma is a pretty good #2 for the M’s and I’m sure Oakland and LA aren’t thrilled at the thought of facing him either.
Or the nightmare scenario: Suppose the A’s and Angels have a dogfight for the division, and the Mariners, going into the last few games, have the second wild card all sewn up. Then they can reset their rotation to have King Felix pitch the play-in game against whoever the Angels or Athletics have available.
Fun to watch, sure, but horrible if you’re a fan of either of the AL West leaders. The system should never give an advantage to the team with the worse record.
I mentioned this a long time ago about how the 2010 AL East/Wild Card would’ve been a pristine example of this under modern convention.
Look at those races. Would’ve been ridiculous if Jon Lester and the Red Sox were able to align to face a team who they’d been trailing every day of the season, basically.
There’s no advantage. In your scenario, the A’s or Angels could work to set their rotation for a potential wildcard game, and potentially lose ground in the division race, or they could not. It just forces another layer of thinking into the overall strategy. I really don’t get how that’s a bad thing.
The odds of them having it sewn up early enough to change things up seems somewhat remote. The loser of Kansas City/Detroit seem likely to stay close in record to the Mariners, and the Yankees are undead and might start sneaking into the race.
To me its looking like Felix will pitch the following days:
8-27
9-1
9-6
9-12 (his turn, the 11th hits an off day and they push him back to face the A’s rather than forward to face the Astros, both games would be at home)
9-17
9-22
9-27
So the wildcard game comes on the 9-1 or 10-2. So he’d be in a spot to start on short rest for 9-1 or regular rest for 9-2. If he pitches 9-10 instead of 9-12 though, he’s on long rest for either game.
Won’t the AL Wild Card game be on September 30 assuming that there are no tiebreaker games required?
If so, Felix should be moved up to start on 9-10, then that’s regular rest for 9-30 a wildcard game. And if tie brakers happen, they might be in it, in which he can pitch, or he’s on 5 days of rest.
I’d move him up against the Astros for normal rest in the playoffs, assuming the Ms think their worst case outcome is wild card bound.
If the Wild Card comes on 9-1, then I will be totally gobsmacked.
“assuming the Ms think their worst case outcome is wild card bound.”
Not at all. Obviously their worst-case outcome is losing out on all wild cards and they stay home. In no way can the 2nd WC be assumed (or even reasonably assured) at this point.
Angels and A’s taking it “right to the wire,” but also the Royals and Tigers taking it to the wire in all probability, and the Mariners, if they gonna get in, will probably have to win their 162nd game. And none of them likely having much opportunity for setting up their rotation for a one game scenario. To me, that’s part of the beauty of how this season is playing.
Ya I can’t believe this article didn’t mention Felix. It’s a gigantic oversight.
…it’s due to the 974 other people rightly pointing out that you can’t just automatically assume Felix pitches the WC when you have to fight to the end just to grab a wild card slot.
Forgetting that is a gigantic oversight.
Also, about comparing each teams winning percentages, winning percentage counts games started by every pitcher in the staff, instead of games started by Felix Hernandez.
…assuming the Mariners have enough of a lead on getting that second wild card spot that they can juggle their rotation to give that start to Felix. Which is far from a sure thing. And then, assuming they win, Felix won’t be available again until relatively late in the short ALDS, vs potentially starting him for both games 1 and 5 (and if the other starters spit the bit, that series might already be lost before he even gets to take the mound: there’s a reason why the Mariners’ playoff odds drop precipitously once you get to the ALDS).
I’m pretty sure there is a day off between the playin game and the first game of the LCS and a day off after the first 2 games, so Felix would be guaranteed to at least pitch one game in the LCS.
For the Mariner’s just to get in the playoffs will be big for them, its been a long drought. They might be happy to just get there. But I think your numbers are incomplete, because they don’t factor in the starting pitcher in the one game playoff. I do like Mariner’s chances in a one game playoff against the Angels rather than the A’s just because of the difference in #1 pitchers, Seattle has 2 bona fide #1’s. The Angels don’t have any since Richards went down. Nobody is going to feel they have the odds going their way in a one game playoff against Felix Hernandez or Hisashi Iwakuma.
If you look at the qualified, not DL starting pitchers in the AL West, the Angels are clearly out armed. They have a scary offense, but they are clearly undermanned when it comes to pitching. Here are Fangraphs rankings in the AL and FIP for the AL West:
1 Felix Hernandez Mariners 2.23
3 Jon Lester Athletics 2.63
13 Hisashi Iwakuma Mariners 3.04
17 Sonny Gray Athletics 3.42
18 Scott Kazmir Athletics 3.42
31 Jesse Chavez Athletics 3.8
34 Roenis Elias Mariners 4.09
35 Jered Weaver Angels 4.26
36 Chris Young Mariners 4.63
39 C.J. Wilson Angels 4.33
And that leaves out James Paxton for the M’s who is healthy now and has 2.20/3.29/2.71 ERA/FIP/xFIP.
The unbalanced schedule gives the overall record somewhat less meaning to begin with. Don’t focus so much on “the 2nd best record” or the “5th best record.” They
allmostly played different teams a different number of times.The playoff system has a crap-ton of randomness to deal with. Does anybody really think the 2001 D-Backs were the best team in baseball that year? Or the 2006 Cardinals? You could probably make a good argument that very few WS winners, at least in the Wild Card era, were truly deserving of the title.
The point is, it’s all about the drama, and the story-lines, and the heartbreaks, and the Cinderellas over the last 3-4 weeks that makes a format worth holding on to. If it were just about crowning an objective “best team,” no playoffs would be necessary.
They had two of the best 3 pitchers that year, which sounds a lot like Seattle. Checkout the two rosters and there are some eerie similarities.
The unbalanced schedules actually make it worse. If a team with the 2nd-best record loses its division, it probably has a tougher schedule as well, thus exacerbating the problem.
It’s professional sports, not Wheel of Fortune. The championship system should place a heavy emphasis on crowning the best team, or close to it–not on making sure everything comes down to the very end. If you are on pace for 98 wins, you should be allowed to coast into the playoffs at the very least.
This. The system needs emphasize having the best teams win. I love an underdog story, but they have to earn it. I don’t want the underdog win to feel like the product of a coin flip. If some team wins the World Series by first winning 4 games out of 6 against the A’s and Angels combined this year (in the wc game and alds), I will feel cheated.
Said team does not have tougher record if said team gets to play two terrible teams to balance two decent teams. The AL East has nearly the same winning percentage as the AL West.
“The championship system should place a heavy emphasis on crowning the best team”
You guys must *HATE* March Madness, or the NFL Playoffs. 1-game samples all the way through? Would drive folks crazy who think the championship is or should be awarded to the “best team”!
Jason,
The better football team has a much better chance of winning a single game than the better baseball team winning a single game. Plus, with football you have the issue of the physical ware a single game brings on, so you can’t really play games that close together. Those two things together help make 1 game samples not much of a problem for football.
March Madness though, yeah, its madness and I don’t particularly give a rats ass about it. I don’t like basketball regardless, but it always seems silly when ESPN or just coworkers around the water cooler make such a deal over such and such team upsetting such and such other team. Whoopy! It has to have meaning beyond luck for me to really care. Why not just have team mascots roll dice at the center of the court? There is some unpredictability!
“If it were just about crowning an objective “best team,” no playoffs would be necessary.”
AC is right on. People act like the playoffs are deciding the “best team” which is not at all what they’re designed to do. They’re meant to designate a “champion” which is the team that is playing the best for 3-4 weeks in October.
Looking at regular season records over 162-game samples would be the much better (not perfect) way to designate “best team”. The playoffs, with their 1, 5, and 7-game samples, are not doing that.
But then again, they’re not attempting to do that.
Its a sad sight to see people wanting champions that aren’t at least arguably the best.
He’s from google on champion:
“a person who has defeated or surpassed all rivals in a competition, especially in sports.”
Personally, I want a system that ensures, of course with in reason, that part in there about “defeated or surpassed” actually has meaning. Ie. we could make those 1-game playoffs 3 innings, but what meaning does it actually have if even the best team vs the worst team would been very nearly a coin-flip?
If you’re gonna win, you gotta earn it. Sorry, I just don’t see the fun in watching a winner crowned out of randomness above all.
Sure, a .589 team at home is generally better than a .550 team on the road, but I expect that difference is smaller than difference made by the starting pitchers.
I would rather be a Seattle/Detroit/Kansas City if they have time to set a line-up vs a Oakland/Anaheim that is fighting to the finish line for a division title.
/set a rotation/
A couple things.
One, like everyone’s jumping on you for above, there’s the starting pitcher factor to consider. The Mariners and Tigers (aka the AL’s two current WC2 contenders) have terrifying-when-healthy rotations fronted by pitchers better than anyone the Athletics or Angels can put out there. Obviously, Detroit fans have been hoping for the division title, but all year long the Great White Hope for Mariners fans has been “get Felix into the one-game playoff”.
Secondly, it’s not all about the playoffs. There’s a lot of value to being a contender in a stretch run; Seattle and Kansas City have already seen their average attendance spike by 2000-3000 fans per game with presumably more to come next year. If the average fan spends $50 at a game, 3000 extra fans over a full season is $24,000,000, AKA Robinson Cano’s annual salary. At some level the season isn’t about winning the World Series. Teams try to make as much money as they can, and you make more money (and sell more season tickets) when you buy at the trade deadline – even if you don’t get those five games in the ALDS or whatever.
Only half of the games are at home.
The better team can be expected to win.
Yup.
It might be tough sometimes figuring out which team is more talented, but we have tools that can help us get a pretty good idea more often than not.
Ok, still with you.
The current season’s record is not a very good way to go about it.
Um… why?
However, at issue here is not specific projections, but a general point about what it means to make the wildcard game.
Eh, ok, if you’re going to make the point and brush it off, I can give the benefit of the doubt, where are you going with…
Taking examples from teams that might be in the wildcard game this season, we have a pretty good idea that Oakland (.589 winning percentage so far this season) is better than Seattle (.550).
But you just said a couple of sentences ago that you shouldn’t use the current season’s record to figure out which team is more talented.
There’s several more examples in this article of conflating and confusing which data you’re using for what, but this was the biggest one to me. You can’t build a whole chain of math trying to guess at which team might be better served in a one-game play-in game on a foundation that you asserted (with no data to back it up) is incorrect. There’s rounding numbers and taking some broad guesses for the sake of simplicity, but then there’s just plain handwaving things away even though you know better.
For me the one-game series goes against the whole point of playing 162 games and multiple game series against the same team during the season. One-game screams football, and seven game series the whole way… hockey’s second season. Baseball needs to find the middle ground somehow. Also, can we talk about the NL getting the DH already? This is getting ridiculous.
Actually the AL needs to lose the DH.
Because it’s so exciting seeing a pitcher attempt to bat. Perhaps, you would also like a rule change forcing a hitter to pitch every game too?
I’ve always been a fan of a hybrid two or three-game wild card series, which still isn’t good but isn’t Bud Selig Lightning Round bad.
If you win the first wild card spot outright, it’s a two-game, double-header series at home, with any win by the home team earning them a spot in the playoffs. So it’s a three-game series with one game awarded the home team. The visitor must win both games on the road to advance. Fans get admission to both games (or just one, in the event of a home win) because that would be rad.
If the two teams tie for the top wildcard, then it’s a straight-up three-game series, with the better head-to-head having two games (and any number of tiebreakers to determine this). It would follow a 1-2 format with the second and third games still being a double-header for the tiebreaking wild card winner.
Any time there is a play-in game to determine who is the top wild card team, there is a three-game series.
This would obviously be a huge disadvantage for any wildcard team moving on, which is fair because they didn’t win the division. Winning the division means being able to set up your rotation and having the opponents pitching staff in disarray.
-C
I don’t buy the ultimate conclusion that the trade-off of increasing your chances this year while decreasing the chance of future success is ultimately “unquantifiable.” Teams do very real calculations to determine the marginal value of wins and postseason success based on their particular market and fan base, and how various outcomes will impact revenue in the form of future ticket sales, merchandise/concession revenue, TV viewership (which can translate into revenue when contracts are negotiated), etc. I agree that like anything else these are based on “data and projections that are known to be fallible,” but I don’t think we should just throw our hands up and say “it’s unquantifiable!”
It seems odd to argue that the Wild Card playoff is essentially random and, at the same time, go “OMG Felix!”. Did everybody forget Joe Saunders defeating Yu Darvish?
As long as we are adding odds to the equation let’s discuss King Felix starting a 1 game wild-card playoff.
I would take a 42% chance to advance to the divisional round any day, but I firmly believe the Mariners chances are higher than that with the King on the bump.
The A’s have multiple elite starting pitchers. None of them are as good as Felix.
Let’s also not forget that the Cardinals won the world series as a wildcard team just a few years ago. 42% odds to get to the divisional round and give yourself a chance? Yes please.
The playoffs have nothing to do with determining the best team and everything to do with the money and the players. Adding more teams and days to the playoffs is problematic because of how long the regular season is. The current 1-game playoff for the second wildcard adds two more teams to the money generator while costing little in extra days. It gets two more teams’ fans very excited and involved. It generates good extra revenue without any real drawbacks. Sure the first wildcard team may be bummed out if eliminated, but the 2nd wildcard team doesn’t really care.
The players need something to shoot for over the long season. The more possibilities to make the postseason, the more players with incentive for the grind. The players are all very aware that it’s a crapshoot, but so what? It’s fun and something to try for. It allows one team to bask in being labeled the best team in baseball, even if they are not except for the tournament.