The Wild Card Round Requires a Particular Fix
This contributor is not a supporter of baseball’s Wild Card game format.
While efforts to make a division title more meaningful are sensible and logical and while the addition of another team to the playoff field keeps more teams involved and fan bases invested during the regular season, the issue for me and many others is its one-game format. While a single play-in contest artificially creates drama and is a fun made-for-TV, web-streaming event, the notion that a team can compile a 100 wins over a season-long marathon only to fall in a single game borders on the absurd.
While the postseason is in many ways a different game from the regular season, one defined by small samples, the Wild Card raises legitimate questions about fairness (a point recently addressed by Craig Edwards) and the purpose of October baseball.
Had the Yankees lost in the AL Wild Card game last year, I suspect we would have heard much more said about revamping the system. Well, we might hear about it this next offseason. After being swept by the Red Sox over the weekend, the Yankees are almost assuredly headed to the Wild Card game again despite being projected to win 100 games. The Red Sox are on pace to win 108.
The Red Sox opened play Monday with a 91.4% chance of winning the divisions, with the Yankees at 8.6%. Entering the weekend? Those figures were at 76.6% and 23.4%, respectively. It was a devastating weekend for New York. While the Yankees could still conceivably win the division, it’s unlikely. The Yankees, the No. 3 team in baseball and the American League in run differential and 19 runs better than the No. 4 team (the Indians), are likely destined for a play-in game.
While not all fans of the sport will feel much sympathy for a club situated in baseball’s largest market, with the most flags currently flying forever, winning 100 games only to end up in a winner-take-all game doesn’t exactly seem to be in line with the most meritocratic of practices.
MLB has released its postseason schedule, and while all three AL division leaders have at least 91.4% playoff odds, the Yankees are in competition with the Mariners and Athletics for the two Wild Card berths. So the Yankees aren’t quite a lock for a playoff berth at all, though this website gives the club 99.8% odds of a playoff berth followed by the Athletics (63.1%) and Mariners (36.9%).
Still, whoever ends up as the No. 1 Wild Card, particularly if they hold more than a game advantage over the second team, deserves a better fate.
Many have proposed expanding the play-in round to a best-of-three series, but expanding the postseason seems to be a non-starter for baseball, as its playoff calendar already pushes into November or close to it. This season will extend to Oct. 31 if the World Series goes to seven games. Some, including Cubs president Theo Epstein, have advocated for a best-of-three series that would include a doubleheader to reduce a day. That would be great entertainment, complete with an NCAA elimination-bracket vibe. But some decision-makers would likely balk at what a doubleheader would do to stretch a pitching staff at the opening of the playoffs. If you do like double-elimination, NCAA-style play, Wes Jenkins published an even more radical MLB postseason proposal at The Hardball Times earlier this summer.
I think there’s a simple, elegant solution that could be implemented easily. Last September, I suggested baseball adopt the best-of-two Wild Card format employed by the KBO. The lower seed needs to win both games, both on the road at the higher seed, while the top Wild Card just needs to win once to advance.
There is a dual beauty to the best-of-two Wild Card in that it not only stretches the calendar by just one more day, but it adds merit to the postseason, and regular season, as it increases the odds of the better-seeded team advancing when compared to a best-of-three or best-of-five series.
Here’s what I wrote about the KBO-style format last September after employing a binomial probability calculator:
While a best-of-three series reduces the chance of an upset by just a few percentage points, from 46.0% to 44.0%, the KBO format reduces the percentage chance of an upset from 46.0% to 21.1%*.
*That’s assuming both teams are equal, with the home team winning 54% of the time.
If the Yankees advance and lose in the AL Wild Card game, there will be plenty of angst about the format, and rightfully so. Baseball has to address the format — particularly if it does arrive, ultimately, at a future of 32 teams and a potentially (likely) expanded playoff field. If there are more Wild Card teams and more play-in games, it would serve the sport well to ensure its best teams more often survive the play-in round. Generally, better teams make for a better postseason. There ought to be a greater penalty for being a lower-ranked Wild Card.
While there is a debate about what divisions should look like and if there ought to be divisions at all — the Central division has served as a parity mechanism, which one could argue is good for the game, in keeping small-market central teams buffered from the Coastal Elites — any change to the playoff format must first address the way to enter LDS series play. A Yankees’ loss in such a game this October might accelerate the process.
A Cleveland native, FanGraphs writer Travis Sawchik is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Big Data Baseball. He also contributes to The Athletic Cleveland, and has written for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, among other outlets. Follow him on Twitter @Travis_Sawchik.
The Yankees losing a play-in game would be pretty bad, but what about when the Wild Card teams are on fairly equal footing?
I think about the NL Wild Card in 2015. Under the KBO system, the 98-win Pirates would’ve needed just one win to advance, and the 97-win Cubs would’ve needed two. Did the Pirates deserve that much of an advantage on the merit of a one-game difference in the standings?
Of course, maybe that is the answer. Maybe we like that it further dramatizes jockeying between two close teams while giving a clear advantage to the better one in situations like this year.
Ding Ding Ding, we have a winner. No way should in that situation the Pirates have gotten that huge advantage. Or even worse, what about 2016. Why should Toronto have to only win 1 game instead of 2 games for Baltimore just because they have a tiebreaker? Or Mets/Giants same thing.
The Yankees have to prove they’re 8 games better than the A’s. Right now, they’re only 3 up.
I was about to post this exact thing. An interesting way to do it from a pure fairness stand-point would be to have two applicable formats, the best of three with a double-header and the KBO style format, and the one that gets used depends on the difference in the standings between the two Wild Card teams. If there’s a difference of, say, five games or more, than it’s the KBO format. If the teams are close enough to suggest relative equality in skill, then the best of three/doubleheader format would be preferable.
I like the idea that teams should be exhausted, though. The teams that won their division played 162 games too. It being a one-game playoff seems ridiculous and too cruel, but having to work that much harder to get into the DS seems entirely reasonable to me.
Instead of having a hard limit where the structure of the series changes entirely, you could say “Always play best of 2, but if there’s a split, instead of automatically advancing the higher seed, turn to the run differential in the two games. Give WC1 a bonus run for each game that separated them and WC2 in the regular season standings, and if WC2 won their game by a big enough margin to overcome that head start plus the game they lost, they get to advance instead.”
This gradually approaches “best-of-2, higher seed always wins a split” as the margin increases between the teams, but has room to vary from that if they’re neck and neck, and the difference comes about rather organically (other than a loophole involving forfeits that would need special-casing to close off).
If the home team is winning, do you play the bottom of the ninth in the first game?
If run differential is relevant, you’ll need to play it, which would feel very weird to me.
Yes, the Pirates deserved that much of an advantage, just as much as winning the division by 1 game could mean the difference between the playoffs and not playing at all.
And the better seeded WC team has almost always won at least one more game than the other team, or if not that, has at least won the tie breaker, which is the head to head match ups, right? So, why not force the worse WC team to make that at least one game up? The more I think about this KBO system, the more I like it. I think a best of three with a double header would be less jarring from a maintaining the status quo, stand point though.
I wouldn’t be opposed to the DS involving a wild card team to essentially have the same system, just with more games. The DS could be the division winner needs to win 2, while the WC team needs to win 3. As, its pretty common to have the top seeded division winners come from the same division as the WCs, the division winners deserve a bit more advantage then 3 home games…
Then leave it the way it is.
I agree with all the objections below, but it seems there is a simple solution – leave it as it is if the difference between 2 WC teams is small, and only employ the ‘best of 2’ when the difference is big. I’m pretty sure someone can figure out where the approx. ‘break even’ point is
I love your proposed solution. The KBO has some traits that make it incredibly exciting (WC format, fan energy and songs, etc.).
However, I feel that most writers forget to mention this: the two leagues are incredibly different, as are divisions within each league. Until MLB can create balanced schedules (which they can’t and shouldn’t, given traveling tolls on West Coast teams), comparing records between divisions and leagues is flawed. The Yankees may be a 100-game WC team, but that 100-win record was driven in part by Baltimore, Kansas City, Chicago (Sox) and Detroit, all four of whom have worse (or approximately equal) records than the worst NL team.
the traveling toll can be mitigated if you do them in batches through an area
Mitigated, but not fixed. Also, they already do this to an extent and to really do it right, you’d have to have teams on the road for much longer (in terms of r consecutive days) time than they already are (which is usually no more than about 10 days). I suspect that you aren’t going to get the players to agree to being on the road for like 3 weeks at a time in a CBA. It would also kind of suck from a fan standpoint if your team is 3 time zones away for such a long duration.
I feel that most commenters forget to mention this: the two leagues are incredibly different, as are divisions within each league. Until MLB can create balanced schedules, comparing records between divisions and leagues is flawed. The Orioles, Royals, and White Sox may be 100-loss teams, but those 100-loss records were driven in part by Boston, New York (Yankees) and Houston, all three of whom have better records than the best NL team.
One other issue with the current format is that it sets up the possibility that the top 2 teams in all of baseball could meet in a best of 5 playoff series. That’s a little ridiculous. The league could at least add a caveat that in this exact scenario the WC team would face the 2nd best division winner.
You could also avoid this by allowing the highest seed in each league to choose their opponent, which would add both strategy and potential for drama
Each team elects one player to be it’s champion. These players may be any position (hitters and pitchers are both eligible). These two champions are both thrust into thunderdome, with standard thunderdome rules (two men enter, one man leaves). This champion’s team then gets home-field advantage, and may pillage one starting pitcher from the other team.
Unless the Yankees and/or Boston are involved, in which case this system is totally unfair and biased against the Yankees/Red Sox and needs to be immediately changed.
“If the Yankees advance and lose in the AL Wild Card game, there will be plenty of angst about the format, and rightfully so.”
Sounds like the hand wringing every time the Packers/Patriots give up a TD on their opponents first possession in OT and their QB’s don’t get a chance.
Which reminds me, who wouldn’t want to see Tom Brady fight anyone? I mean he’d lose, but the spectacle of it would be great.
He is a 6’4”, 215 lb professional athlete. He would kick Turtle’s ass and probably yours too.
To my memory, this hand-wringing happens when the Patriots *score* a TD in overtime and the other team doesn’t get a chance to retaliate. (See Super Bowel LI) The Patriots have only been on the losing end of this situation once ever, in 2015 against the Jets. Can’t speak to the Packers tho…
The Yankees will take Judge, we will pick Matt Chapman, Man Chapman will slay Judge like Achilles kills that huge man in Troy.
Was going to go the same direction here. Chaptain America for the win!
There is no fix that won’t just end up causing another horrible injustice in some later year.
When you put a WC entry on the same footing as a division winner, it’s not “fair” to that division winner
When you advantage the WC1 it’s not “fair” in years that the WC2 is only a game or so behind them.
When you put WC1 and WC2 on equal footing it’s not “fair” when the WC1 is many games better.
And, of course, all of the above is a bit silly given the “unfair” nature of the imbalanced schedule.
Should all divisions decided by 1 game also be subject to a 163rd game to give the team who finished behind in the standings a chance to catch up? There has to be a far more distinct advantage to finishing ahead of another team in the standings that is more than just hosting a play-in game.
Why? The point of the relatively random nature of the WC game is to make the division mean something … how the WCs compare to one another is fairly meaningless.
“…is fairly meaningless [right now].” which is the aspect many people want to change. Every seeding should be meaningful, and Travis is arguing the 1st WC team should have a far greater advantage over the 2nd WC team. I agree with him.
The playoffs as a whole are absolutely designed to be “unfair” to the best teams from the regular season — otherwise, why have them? The best team over 162 games is the best team!
Of course, for perfect fairness, we’d have to eliminate the unbalanced schedule. So put all 30 teams in one league, and everyone plays 6 games against the other 29 teams, for a total of 174 games.
Because we’d have no playoffs, that schedule would work great. Only problem would be the owners, TV execs etc. crying “unfair” over the lost revenue.
All 30 in one league. Everyone plays 3 games against the other 29 teams, for a total of 87 games. The bottom 10 teams are done for the season. Sorry. Go home. Or play a toilet bowl bottom tier second season. I don’t care.
Each of the top 20 teams play 3 games against the other 19 teams, for a total of 57 games. The bottom 12 teams are done for the season. Sorry. Go home.
The remaining 8 playoff series:
Round 1: best of 5
Round 2: best of 7
World Series: best of 9
OR the remaining 8 play a College World Series-style double elimination tournament held in a glorious $1.9B stadium in Las Vegas.
There are no problems with any of this. I’m sure of it. It’s perfect.
Since the A’s payroll is only $75-ish million, maybe the Yankees should only be allowed to use $75-ish million of their roster in a hypothetical Wild Card Game. You know, so it’s “fair.”
It makes for a great David vs Goliath story line if it plays out especially if the game is in New York and Oak wins. The press will love it and the execs wont since losing NYY from the post season early dings ratings.
This isn’t really about fairness. Its about coming up with a system that seems logical and generates the most fan interest while hopefully highlighting the game’s best teams the longest.
I, for one, would love to see the Yankees loose in the play-in game. In fact the Yankees can always loose as far as I am concerned.
And I am not sure how “fair” a system is that would make it easier for the Yankees to add another championship. This seems like a reasonable penalty for their financial and historical advantages.
I don’t know, I feel like they usually play pretty tight.
I would love to see both Seattle and Oakland pass the Yankees and the Yankees don’t even make the playoffs.
Honestly, looking at this year’s schedule, they could have a three game wild card series (of all home games for the first WC), and only add one day to the postseason schedule. Season ends 9/30, WC games on 10/2, 10/3 and 10/4, the DS round without wild card teams starts on 10/5, and the DS round with WC teams starts 10/6. It would literally be one day later (currently starting the DS on 10/4 and 10/5). And then the fans and the teams would get a true series rather than a weird one-off game, and MLB could sell ads for up to 4 more games. Seems easy from here.
So a team that wins a tiebreaker would get 3 home games to none for team that lost tiebreaker. Sorry but that’s a non starter.
No home games for the second wild card seems like a constant. It’s the incentive to finish first. With the current one game WC, only WC1 gets a home game. Same goes if they move to the KBO-style two game series.
If you’re dead set on there being a home game for each team, then you have to think about playing a double header so you can have a travel day in between, but eve then you’d likely end up with the decisive game 3 being a home game for WC2.
But there have been several times where the 2 wild card teams have finished tied. Other times it’s been 1 game between teams who didn’t finish first. That’s the thing, these teams didn’t finish first.
How about this … scrap the 2nd wildcard all together.
Make the divisional playoff round into a Best of 7, for all. However, in the series against the wildcard team – make the division winning team start off 1-0 (The team with the better record has to win 3 games and the wildcard team needs to win 4).
This way, you don’t have any 1 game playoffs – and there IS an incentive for winning a division vs. just winning the wildcard.
I’d prefer to just go back to the old 8-team format. My issue with the second wild card is it usually means all but the very worst teams are in “contention” late into the season. Which I get is probably good for the game, but as a fan of a perennially mediocre team I actually resent the artifice designed to keep me invested in said mediocrity. It’s stupid. Expansion can’t get here soon enough.
You are right, it seems that the second wild card stop is just an “artifice designed to keep me invested in said mediocrity”. I really don’t like the “excitement” generated by the new format to see what relatively mediocre team can have a ~40% chance of winning against the WC1 and advancing to the divisional round.
I do not view the wild card play-in game to be a “true” postseason game, but rather as a form a punishment for the first wild card winner (who would otherwise not face such as game). As a “punishment”, it serves to provide an incentive to win the division so they would not face the coin-flip (or perhaps a 60/40) of a wild card game.
I propose to eliminate the wild card play-in game if the WC2 is more than x games behind WC1. I think 5 is a good number. That would provide the wild card round some excitement, since the WC1 is always in the race to be more than x games ahead of the WC2 team or win their division to avoid the play-in game.
While that not guarantee a play-off game, it would make the regular reason playoff races more exciting, although ironically, some of the excitement for the wild card race comes from avoiding a game, not playing to get into a play-in game.
even if you’re right there’s no way execs choose to eliminate the WC game and the revenue that comes with it. They didn’t add it because of fairness or logic, just $
Would much rather just eliminate divisions when it comes to postseason seeding
Yeah, that the Indians are going to coast into the playoffs with likely the 6th best record in the AL, while one of the A’s, Mariners or Yankees will miss out, despite the latter 3 playing far more difficult schedules seems problematic. The ‘shielding from coastal elites’ is basically nonsense, because the A’s, Padres, Rays etc are not as ‘big market’ as the Cubs or the Tigers.
Or the Cardinals for that matter.
I also cringed at that “coastal elites” comment. Cubs and Astros anyone?
You cannot compare winning percentages across divisions. The competition is very different. In 2015 the 3 best records in baseball were in the NL Central division. Is it because they were the best in baseball, or did they benefit from MIL and CIN going a collective 407%? Each team plays 76 games within its division, who you play against makes a huge difference.
But did those two teams go .407 because of the three teams? Just check division record outside of division but even that isn’t that great because of interleague imbalance.
This point may be valid in some years, but isn’t true of 2015 in particular (or likely any year where both wild cards come out of the same division).In 2015, the only MLB teams who had a winning record vs the Central were the Cubs, Cards, and Royals (who went 8-0 vs MIL and CIN and 5-7 vs the 3 playoff teams). Further, consider a 2015 Division comparison between the NL East and Central
Mets 90-72 Cardinals 100-62
Nationals 83-79 Pirates 98-64
Marlins 71-91 Cubs 97-65
Braves 67-95 Brewers 68-94
Phillies 63-99 Reds 64-98
Based on the other teams boosting win total argument the Mets should have won over 100 games not the Cardinals. The good teams in the Central got 38 games against the Brewers and Reds but also 38 against the other two juggernauts. The Mets had 76 games vs a collective .438 winning percentage. The Cardinals had 76 games vs a collective .505 winning percentage.
I think they should make the wild card a 2 out of 3 series (which makes it fair when one WC team finishes way ahead of the 2nd WC team – and when both WC teams finish with similar records).
As for extending the schedule – here’s an idea – play 2 days in a row more often like they do all season long. Make teams use their full 25 man roster, instead of being able to run out the same 3 or 4 relievers every night. Teams go from playing 28 out of 30 days in a month to getting every other day off in the playoffs – it’s nuts.
I’m a NY baseball fan, but you know what? If you don’t like losing a wild card game, then just win the wild card game.
If you don’t want to be in the wild card, then put your big boy pants on and win the division.
Here here.
Hear hear*. Didn’t realize which version of the word it was.
Thank you.
Exactly. Short and sweet.
It’s a play-in game, not a playoff.
It’s already a second chance for a team that failed to win its division.
Why give them a third chance?
For decades failing to win the division meant an early off-season and nobody cared.
One game is more than enough.
While I think there is merit to ‘just win the division’ argument, the fact that you used to have to win your division to make the playoffs is completely irrelevant. Just because something was done a certain way in the past doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the best way to do it going forward.
If i could give two thumbs up I will, that is it win or don’t complain about it.
I really don’t know why I click into This Contributor’s posts at all anymore. There’s never anything approaching an actual argument, it’s all just arbitrary assertion the whole way through. But I would, genuinely, like to know what the alternative to “artificial” playoff excitement is. What is the playoff state of nature?
Why does every article need to be an “argument”?
Care to make an argument as to why all articles should be an argument, instead of just asserting that that’s bad?
If the author is not even trying to persuade anyone to agree with him, why is he bothering to write a Fangraphs post instead of a lyric poem or a note to his therapist? Are you being wilfully obtuse? Are we playing Questions?
Hey, Carson’s posts are great fun, and I am pretty sure he is not trying to persuade anyone. Unfortunately for the rest of the aspiring writers out there, there is only one Carson Cistulli, literal poet and sabermetric writer.
What’s the argument behind the articles where he interviews players? Those are always highly regarded on this site (my own opinion aside)
Personally I click him because I like to see him get trashed by the more astute readers here.
I like the articles not because of his argument (or lack thereof — there’s some seriously cheese-grater-like reasoning in there), but because it’s fun to read through the comments to:
1. Find better/different/interesting arguments
2. Play the game “How far down is the first comment complaining about the article’s lack of [editing/structure/sense]?”
How does a cheese grater reason tho
This is silly, the only reason anyone is talking about this now is because it’s the Yankee’s. In 2015, a 98 win Pirates team lost to a 97 win Cubs team. They were the 2nd and 3rd best records in baseball that year. The 90 win Mets and 92 Win Dodgers got byes. No one was complaining because the Cubs (big market) won and the Pirates (small market) didn’t. These “controversies” only come up when a mega market team is getting screwed.
spot on
If the two WC teams are equal then it’s not the same issue. I’m sure there were some articles that year about playoff seeding, as usual.
Yep.
Yeah, I’m not buying this. I remember plenty of crowing about the Cubs and the Pirates, and I’ve read plenty more about them on this site recently. Clearly no one’s forgotten.
It may be louder this year, and that may have something to do with the markets involved, but it probably has as much to do with the provision of additional information. There’s been more instances of teams getting “screwed” simply because we’ve had a larger sample to analyze.
I say all of this, and not to make the argument to change the format. I actually think it’s working. But take the chip off your shoulder and spare us the “only reason is because it’s the Yankees argument”. It’s tired.
There was crowing back in 2015, but there won’t be nearly as much as if the Yankees are in the one game play in. The only reason the Bucs/Cubs are rehashed now is in reference to the Yankees. You said that this particular market may result in more crowing with the market involved…jeez ya think?
Still think it has more to do with the provision of additional, supportive information. There could be another example this year. The more instances that occur, the more we can site, and the louder we’ll get. (Royal “we”. I actually like the current format).
Even though the writer of this article suggested this same alternative last year, I didn’t hear much of any objection to the format from the national media, and the Yankees were still the team subjected to playing a one game play in against a far inferior opponent. The difference is that last year the Yankees were a clear fourth behind the AL division winners. This year, prior to being swept this weekend, they were the second best team in baseball.
That’s perhaps why people (not me) are apparently hearing more outcry regarding the format. Not (just) because it’s the Yankees. But because of where they are in the standings relative to the rest of the league.
Travis is certainly entitled to his opinion, but I’m of the mind that the wild-card format works really well. If you’re really that much better a team than the second wild-card, you should be able to dispatch your opponent just fine. The winner-take-all format of the wild-card round makes it more exciting, and the chance that anything could happen (!) is what makes it great. What makes for a good postseason is not that our preconceived notion of who is the “best” team makes it, but the drama.
Too much concern over “fairness” and not enough about what makes for a compelling game. Reducing the chance of an upset is no fun at all.
I think the wild-card game has been a tremendous improvement to the playoff format, and I say that despite my team being one that’s gone home after a one-game postseason.
I also really enjoy the one-game wildcard format, as a fan of a team that got eliminated in same by the Yankees last year (and for something like the last 4 playoff appearances).
I don’t find coin flips compelling. Superficially entertaining perhaps, but not compelling.
I find the best teams playing each other far more compelling, than I find 84 win teams playing in the World Series.
1 game playoffs are coin flips. 2, 3, 5, and 7 games series are only slightly less so. The sample size is not remotely determinative, not matter what the poets and true fans like to claim. Off days between each game means that a team’s depth advantages are largely neutered, and back end starters may never touch the ball. Even stud pitchers rarely go deep, but often resurface throwing random high leverage relief innings.
All in all, playoff baseball is but a close cousin of regular season baseball. The format is already such that the things that helped achieve the very best records don’t matter. Why are we arguing about seedings again?
But that’s the issue. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say, “gee, Team A is waaaay better than Team B” but also say “It’s really just a coin flip.” The fact is, neither of those things are true. The 162-game schedule takes small differences between teams and magnifies them. A team with a 61% winning percentage vs. a team with a 57% winning percentage is just not that big, even though that results in an 8-game advantage to the team with the 61% winning percentage. And the team with the 61% winning percentage should be favored to win, and is favored, and usually will win. It is not a coin flip. It is a match between two relatively even opponents, which is something we often see in baseball (and which, quite frankly, describes much of the National League right now).
Besides, saying a team with a winning percentage of “Team B was so bad, yet it somehow fought its way through the best teams in major league baseball to get to the world series” is the moment at which our preconceived notions of the best team overwhelms the data being presented to us. Maybe they weren’t the single best team in their league, but it was close enough that it didn’t matter.
Or maybe they battled injuries that hid their true talent level.
Rarely does a team sail through the regular season injury free.
To save a travel day, how about having the wildcard game(s) played at the home park of the divisional winner who will face the WC winner…?
This seems like a great idea!
My God. I hope the A’s keep going and the Mariners right their ship if only so that the two of them can get the Yankees knocked out of the playoffs. The whining from the baseball media over the Yankees maybe not fulfilling their promised destiny is tiresome.
Yes, it’s interesting that this seems to be a serious issue only when the team which might be forced to play a one-game playoff is the Yankees.
Not quite as tiresome as this (cold) take. Media pundits will debate the Wild Card format until it’s inevitably expanded, and then they’ll keep on debating nonetheless.
If you like the format, say so, and tell us why. If you don’t, tell us that instead. Maybe even offer an alternative suggestion if you’ve got one.
But please, everyone, forget the “only because it’s the Yankees” arguments. They’re overdone and dry.
I guess maybe it’s just that I primarily get my baseball perspectives from the unbiased folks here at Fangraphs and have not been subject to the “whining from the baseball media”.
Oh well. Just tune it out!
I found this kinda funny in that you’re unable (or unwilling) to tune out the Yankee angle of this.
As a fan of the Bucs, I’m fine with the current format. It’s great theater, and baseball seems to have recognized this and milked it well.
But this new suggestion intrigues me too, as I think it adds a new wrinkle, and gives a bit of an advantage to WC team 1. My bigger worry is when we eventually get to 32 teams, they’re likely going to move to 8 divisions, creating this problem of mediocre division winners all over again. I’d rather have four divisions of eight with each league having the division winnners and then the teams with the three best records after that enter the playoffs, with the KBO style play in.
I’m a Yankee fan, and I like the current format. If they don’t win the division, then they don’t deserve better than a one game play in. It’s better than it would have been 25 years ago when they wouldn’t have even gotten that opportunity.
I’ll go all in here and say that, for me, there hasn’t even been anything format related to tune out, and I live in NY. I listen to sports talk radio for about an hour and a half every day, and no one is complaining about the playoff format. They complain about Boone and Cashman. They complain about how much everyone strikes out. They want to see Sheffield. And Florial (seriously). They wanted to trade for Harper and Bumgarner and deGrom.
Seriously, there is a litany of reactionary, irrational arguments made by Yankee fans and local media on a daily basis that you can get on them for, but this just isn’t one of them.
Think it’s time for everyone’s little town blues to melt away.
Or they could do what is done in English Football where 3 teams are promoted — the top 2 in the standings, plus the winner of a single elimination playoff between the next four teams. Instead of the Yankees playing the A’s/Mariners in one game and being eliminated, they could be eliminated by losing to the Rays….or by beating the Rays in 42 innings and losing to the Mariners with Domingo Acevedo failing to close out a 44 inning thriller. Great hilarity and hand-wringing would ensue!
I disagree strongly with Travis on this. It’s not broken and doesn’t need to be fixed.
Team A currently leads Team B by 3 games. Team B plays in the most difficult division in baseball, having to play nearly 40 games against teams headed for 90+ wins. Over the past eight weeks, team B is 33-10; Team A is 24-22.
So someone please tell me where the inequity lies? Other than Team A is the most famous franchise in the sport from the biggest market? One could easily argue that it will be the A’s who get screwed by a one game playoff more than the Yankees.
Because team A is projected to win 101 games and the other is projected to win 91 games. Is this really a mystery?
First add 2 teams.
The 32 teams play a 162 Game regular season. Top 16 teams make the playoffs. Playoffs are a round robin 162 game season the following year. The following year the top 8 teams make the playoffs and we keep eliminating half the team.
After year 4, the top 2 teams face off in a best of three series. Game 1 is cricket, Game 2 is quidditch, and if we are lucky, Game 3 is a winner take all baseball game. This is the absolute only way to crown a true champion.
The more teams that make it to the postseason, the less interesting the regular season will be. Why not split the two completely? Reward the best records in the NL and AL with a pennant, and have a World Series knockout tournament after that.
If only we could put the genie back in that bottle. Hell, I’d even take it if there was only one Wild Card team and they automatically moved into a best of five! Or, novel thought, what if they only played a 154 game season, and gave themselves room on the calendar for the expanded playoffs that they covet while also sparing us needing to watch baseball in March and November.
Unfortunately, it’s all about money. We’re going to see the playoffs expanded before we ever see them reduced, and it will continue to devalue the regular season.
Thing is, I think it going from 4 teams to 5 teams actually has made the regular season more important. There is a much greater value now winning the division. Before, there were a lot of times where it was better to win the wild card then win the actual division. That’s a problem.
I totally agree.
I guess my point is that I would hope that we would see a reduced playoff field > an increased one, but that is never going to happen, and $$$ is at the root of it.
I think that the way to satisfy the people concerned about what might happen this year is to adopt Travis’ suggestion only if the wild-card team with the better record is the Yankees. That seems like the most reasonable approach.
Can we pump the breaks on the notion of ‘fairness’ here for a moment? Because I’d argue that one of the few things that’s fundamentally unfair in this conversation is the idea of moving the goalposts every time we run into an outcome we don’t like. There will always be winners or losers when you make rules, that is the nature of rulemaking, and the result will always be characterized as unfair if the system has contrived to designate you the loser. Ex: Want two games? Why should a 100 win Yankees team potentially have to have two all hands on deck playoff games before they go on to face a well rested Indians team that won 10 fewer games?
The wild card play in games are (1) nonsense in their sample sizes (2) some of the best games of the season every year. From an entertainment perspective, I think nothing is broken here, no matter how much fans of large market teams who feel entitled to more bleat about it, and I enjoy the long shot chance that an underdog team like the As can make it to a divisional series whereas under previous systems they would’ve been locked out entirely.
I already implied this above but it’s worth saying outright that the “fairness” argument is just an argument against having playoffs at all. I’m personally on the fence about just being anti-playoff, and flirt with adopting that position sometimes — I think it’s a far more reasonable position than most of the Goldilocks versions where somehow a handful more or fewer playoff games is the obviously perfect number (and it’s hard to escape the observation that the perfect sweet spot for the playoff format, most often, just happens to be the one from when the person writing was 13 years old).
Yes, I think the people who are pounding the table about the playoff format are either:
(1) numbers people who are out to optimize a system that they simply view as intellectually unsound or
(2) fans who feel their team has been directly shafted (or is about to be shafted) by the format
The latter is the very definition of an interested party, who shouldn’t be allowed to move the needle much, and the former is either ignoring or oblivious to the fact that far and away the two most important considerations are entertainment and scheduling practicality. The desperation level of the play in games in my opinion makes them the best thing in the post season, short of W.S. game 6 and 7s. Why we’d want to screw that up in the name of a more abstractly fair system is beyond me – we’re not shooting for some Platonic ideal here, it’s baseball.
3) MLB who doesn’t like that the WC game makes it less likely that the Yankees and Red Sox will both be in the “real playoffs” that start with the LDS. If we were to eliminate the WC game they’d both be in there and if we were to further disallow teams from the same division playing in the first round, they’d be more likely to be around for the ALCS. They neither care about their own fandoms, nor any abstract ideal of fairness. They care about how to maximize long term profits.
Anti playoff?!?! Next you’ll tell me you don’t like bacon!
Would you still enjoy it if the Yankees were the 92 win team beating a 102 win Oakland team? That could happen this year!
Extends the season just one day? That’s not true. It’d be two days if it’s a home and home. Or are you suggesting it’s ok to have a game in NY (night game of course) followed the very next day by a game in Seattle? That would be ridiculous. Imagine a game going extras that doesn’t end till 1 am EST followed 19 hrs later by the next one. It’s 2900 miles and a 6 hr flight NY-SEA. This is a scenario very possible this season. And the winner gets to fly all the way back to Boston the next day.
It’s a terrible idea. There is no great solution. The fairest set up was having just one wildcard team but that isn’t great either because of lost revenue and league excitement.
The yankees already played a doubleheader in Washington this year followed a game in Seattle the next day.
And that was the playoffs? The winning team travelling that much, that quickly, while also taxing the bullpen and using it’s best starters is too much of an advantage for the team that awaits the winner.
So you’re re-hashing an article you already wrote, and essentially duplicating an article about this very topic from a few days ago except for saying “hey I wrote an article last year that’s apropos!”, at the very moment that the Yankees have collapsed and are only a few games from WC2?
I actually think the current system is too generous to the Yankees, who, after potentially losing the AL East to the Red Sox by double digit, may be able to wipe that all away with one win in the Wild Card game. If they were to win, the Red Sox would not have to do again in a best of 5 what they so definitively did over 162 games in the regular season. That’s not unfair to the Yankees. It’s unfair to the Red Sox.
As long as there a wild cards, we have to accept that the purpose of the post season is to generate revenue, not determine a deserving champion. So, before we can prescribe a particular fix, we have to know what the particular problem we are trying to solve. Right now, the wild card is a gimmick, so, from a financial standpoint, the current format works just fine.
Next time FG writes about this issue, I hope they include a reader poll.
Personally, I will vote for It Ain’t Broke, So Don’t Fix It.
Funny that in 2015 when the 98-win, small-market Pirates (second-best record overall in MLB) lost to a big-market Cubs team who had a worse record, nobody seemed to have a real problem with that.
I mean Travis has a history most associated with the Pirates. People complain all the time that he answers too many Pittsburgh questions in his chat. So which is it ?
I like Travis a lot for his content, but I think his current takes on the Pirates are…unsound. I usually steer clear of his articles on them now. He’ll likely get more Bucs questions because that’s his background. I see lots of Braves questions asked of Kiley. Same thing.
The current system is great the way it is. Enough hand-wringing.
I just want a balanced schedule.
I’m agnostic about the proposal, but it gives me another reason to root for a Yankees playoff loss this year. So maybe.
Neither the current system or this proposed system would fix all the the problems. If we really wanted the best team to win the World Series, we’d just hand them the trophy at the end of the regular season. Maybe there’s a better way, but I think the current system mostly works. Sometimes, like this year, a good team is going to get unlucky.
Exactly – maybe there is a new incentive to having the best record in each league to add incentive to winning as much as possible – but all that is somewhat skewed by divisions already…
I was skeptical about the two-wild-card format initially, in part because letting in a fifth, inferior team into the playoffs in each league seemed a backwards way to make winning the division “count.” But it’s made for a more exciting regular season and the single-elimination games have generally been memorable as well. I suppose I’ve gotten on board with the idea that finishing second in your division shouldn’t entitle you to anything. If you consider the coin-flip game a consolation prize for division losers, suddenly it doesn’t seem so inequitable. Teams love hanging banners for division championships–it makes sense that they mean something.
I’m much more interested in lengthening the Division Series to seven games. As constructed, it’s actually advantageous to play strong teams early when you only need to steal three of five, not four of seven. That’s backwards and needs to be fixed. Five-game series can also end remarkably quickly, which seems incongruous after the long haul of the regular season. Of course, seven-game series aren’t much better, but at least they’re a step in the right direction.
I’d actually be amenable to even longer series with fewer rest/travel days to better recreate regular season-like conditions, but that won’t happen, of course.
“the notion that a team can compile a 100 wins over a season-long marathon only to fall in a single game borders on the absurd.” I mean … WHY? Why is this absurd? The rules are the rules. Is it absurd that baseball for most of its history had two leagues, and the two league winners played each other, and many other teams that won lots of games in the season-long marathon played in the playoffs not at all? Or from 1969 to 1993 that only 4 teams got in? How is the current wildcard format more absurd than that? Answer: it clearly is not.
There is nothing fundamentally absurd about any rule about playoffs that a professional entertainment organization decides. I think any rule that extends the layoff between the end of the regular season and the start of the division series is a bad idea, it’s unfair to the division winner who has to wait. This isn’t football, extended off days in baseball definitely can have a negative impact. The single elimination game is fun and it’s totally fine
One thing I love about this – it makes WC1 a real prize over WC2. Right now home field advantage is of course nice, but not something you’d really want to fight super hard for. In the suggested format it’s a HUGE deal and could make for some amazing end of season drama in years where the two wild card teams have close records.
I guess, but generally both wildcard teams are already incentivized to play hard to catch their division leader and get out of the play-in game altogether.
I see a chance to solve different issues.. first make the season shorter… 162 games or 152 gamee… like whatever… Stop in mid septembre… use the extra days for a series between the top 2or3or4 wild cards? Then a couple days off and start the playoff.. more fun.. and more teams that would want to compete
1,3,5,7 should be the playoff format and only one day off between rounds 3,5 and 5,7. No days off within the series which would benefit deeper teams and eliminate he bias towards teams with just two good starters
What happens when both WC teams have the same record? How is adding more games making anything fairer?
MLB’s playoffs are inherently unfair, and tweaks like this do nothing to make them fairer.
The unnecessary use of the third person on this site is getting out of control.
The purest and fairest solution is to eliminate the divisions, balance the schedule, and utilize a seeding system. The bottom two seeds (again, based on a totally balanced schedule where everybody in the same league plays the same teams the same amount of times) have to fight it out in a one-game playoff. If this system were in place right now, the American League would be very interesting…
1. BOS
2. HOU
3. NYY
4. OAK/SEA
Cleveland would miss the postseason, as perhaps they should given they have a worse record than both Oakland and Seattle!
The way to do this without creating a travel nightmare is to have longer series: five games apiece, for a total of 10 games per year (five at home and five on the road) against every team in your league. 150 game season if you expand to 16 teams in each league, and a hell of a lot less travel for the teams. Five games is also a nice number because fans would get to see all that an opposing team has to offer, not just the three games per year they have now for non-division teams in which you’ll be lucky if you get to see the starting pitcher you’ve always wanted to see, for example…
in theory this is pretty perfect but every time the shortening of the regular season is brought up it gets shouted down immediately. apparently the owners arent willing to give up that revenue.
but yeah the math works out beautifully in this scenario.
put me in the ‘if it aint broke dont fix it’ camp. certain divisions are strong sometimes and weak sometimes. its all cyclical. given the nature of the rules, this is bound to happen some years. the playoff format is fun and exciting and the one game playoffs are amazing, intense, super enjoyable dramabombs.
a similar thing happened in the nba this year where there happened to be two far and away best teams and they were both in the same conference essentially turning the western conference finals into the de facto nba finals. the media was all abuzz with talk of reseeding before the playoffs regardless of conference bc the two best teams ‘should’ or ‘deserve’ to meet in the nba finals. its a silly thing to worry about imo.
this stuff is just bound to happens sometimes due to the natural randomness of results and theres no ‘fixing’ of the system that would guarantee eliminating it.
Fuck the Yankees.
I’m mostly in the camp that says, this isn’t a real problem. Having said that, I have a tweak to Travis’ tweak.
You could implement the KBO setup, but ONLY for situations where the two WC clubs are separated by at least five games in the standings. For closer races, leave the play-in game as-is.
Why not just expand to 32 teams and play like college basketball? And then whatever team loses owner has to be kicked in the balls on national tv by a random fan who won a contest at McDonalds?
Was it absurd when Seattle, the best regular season team in history, finished 21 games ahead of the Yankees, yet had no advantage in the playoffs? Don’t remember Yankees fans complaining about that…
But seriously, why are people trying to make it more fair? Whose goal is that? Even as a “baseball nerd” I want less fair. I want more variance, more noise. That is what makes the game fun. If the better team always won, or even won a higher percentage of the time then the game would be less fun.
Under the pre-Wild Card rules, the Yankees wouldn’t have even been in the playoffs. Baseball (and life) aren’t fair.
A 99-win team lost the Wild Card game three years ago. With all of this whining going on about the picked on Yankees, I just want to see the Wild Card game eliminated entirely. Then they won’t even make the playoffs
If you do t win your division, you’re at a disadvantage for the playoffs. Period. That’s the reason for the system. It doesn’t matter how many was you got during the regular season
These suggestions are utterly stupid designed to just assume that it is the Yankees the victims of some made up injustice. The once off winner takes all is a method used in just about every major sport including Football/Soccer, the best team does not always win and no way should any rules be changed just to give the side with a record a better chance of going through.
The best of 2 and the second WC team needing to win both is just a stupid idea and unnecessary, it must stay the same, one game one sport winners go to the post season, losers go to offseason it works well.
I have no love loss for the Yankees, they may not even get 100 wins they way they are playing but to have a chance at dumping them out is fine by me. Baseball doesn’t revolve around the Yankees
Rules are rules Yankee Fans!
The doubleheader option is objectively better. It has the added bonus as a penalty against teams that didn’t win the division. The only issue is that you probably can’t do anything to prevent teams from abusing their pitchers, but they already do that anyway.
Also, I’m not convinced either option is better than the one game chaos-take-all format.
A good way to make more time for playoffs at the end of the year is to compress the schedule with summer (separate admission) Saturday doubleheaders. Put a half dozen on the sked and you can end the season a week and a half early. You could run them in like June and July.
The owners win because this basically transforms a number of weekday evening games into Saturday afternoon games, and weekend summer afternoon game tickets sell well. And it gives them more time for fall playoff games. The players union might go along if you expanded the rosters to 27 players while the doubleheaders were running, creating more MLB jobs.
The only reason the Yankees have a hundred wins pace is because of the plethora of really bad teams they have faced this year. The NL is far more balanced and so it is much harder to win in the NL. Dodgers have more talent than either the Red Sox or Yankees and look at their pace.
I’m not sure if the Dodgers have more talent but I am sure that the Red Sox and Yankees are not nearly as good as their record would seem to suggest. They’re playing just too many games against tanking or otherwise bad teams in the AL. I mean the A’s have the 4th best record in the majors. Their top five starters in IP are Manaea, Mengden, Cahill, Montas, Jackson. Something very screwy is going on in the AL.
Best W% vs. teams now over .500:
1) Yankees, 26-17
2) Red Sox, 22-16
3) Astros, 27-21
Yes, the NL leaders have played more such games. But don’t pretend their standings are any less built on the bad teams. The top 3 NL teams by overall W%:
1) Cubs, 35-32 vs. winning teams, 31-16 vs. 500 and lower.
2) Brewers, 34-37 vs. winners, 32-15 vs. .500 and lower.
3) Phillies, 35-31 vs. winners, 29-19 vs. .500 and lower.
That’s a combined 4 games over .500 vs. winning teams, 42 over .500 vs. others. Which is a common way of making the playoffs — beat the teams you’re supposed to beat. But all in all, I’ll take NYY/BOS/HOU for the WS title, and you can have the rest of the field.
Why don’t we just make the rule that the Yankees are guaranteed at least 1 best-of-5 playoff series? Because that’s the slippery slope result of constantly changing the rules every time there’s a sub-optimal outcome and the Yankees get the short end of the stick. A few years from now we’ll get “wait, it’s not fair that a 93 win Yankee team has to win twice against a 94 win Oakland team!” and so on.
“While a best-of-three series reduces the chance of an upset by just a few percentage points, from 46.0% to 44.0%, the KBO format reduces the percentage chance of an upset from 46.0% to 21.1%”.
WHY WOULD WE WANT THIS?! If the point is to make the #1 Wild Card a near sure lock for the division series there’s an easier way to do that: from ’95 till ’11 who’s now the #1 Wild Card made the division series. This caused teams in a Red Sox/Yankees position (well, what they were prior to this series) to NOT add at the deadline (as these teams did) and to not play hard down the stretch. Before ’95 the second best record in all of baseball could be left out of the playoffs. Now the top 3 are guaranteed a seat. Winning the division is now very important again, even more important , I’d wager, than Travis Sawchick’s arbitrary feeling of “fair.”
You realize MLB’s broadcast partners would never go for this. The 1st game of the double-header would not be in prime-time and the prime-time slot would only have a game about half the time.
Bemused by the discussion of fairness. If a team is not good enough to win its own división, they should not be in the playoffs. The notion that a team that can’t win its own division could be WS champions due to SSS luck is ridiculous.
The only advantage post season teams should get is home field advantage. If you are in the postseason, you are in. It shouldn’t matter if you win 105, but not your division and the second wild card only won 88. Neither won their division so they are on equal ground. This is like people crying about an 8-8 team winning a division in football and making the playoffs. They won their division, get over it. There is nothing needed to fix here in baseball unless you want to get rid of the play in game altogether, because that is what it really is.
The funny thing is that the wildcard game was originally created because great teams were left at home several times just because of playing in a crazy good division. I remember one year when Atlanta and San Francisco both won over 100 games but only one went to the playoffs. Now, there are complaints because teams like the Yankees “only” get that one game to try to advance. This is a chance that wouldn’t have even had 15 years ago. Personally, I think the lower ranked team being required to win two games is an awful idea. You may as well just not have that #2 wildcard team. My solution would be to have the playoffs based on overall standings. The top 5 teams in each league would make the playoffs. Seeds #4 and #5 would be required to play a 3 game series to advance. I know this idea has problems too….but I don’t think there is a perfect answer to the problem.
Yeah, why should the Yankees get an advantage when they can get fat playing AAAA Baltimore and Toronto?
The Wild Card is what it is- if you are not good enough to win the division (which the Yankees are not) then be grateful for the opportunity to play-in 16-seed style. Imbalanced divisions? Make fewer divisions so we don’t have the Indians get 80+ games against Minn, CWS, KC, and Det.
The KBO 2-game scenario is trash and would be exposed the moment the Yankees fell 2 #2 in the WC pecking order and had to travel cross-country to foul out in the O.Co…. twice. The division winners cannot be put at the disadvantage of having potentially 2-3 weeks of no baseball (3 game series) and low-leverage baseball (having already clinched). The second WC is great because it does penalize the teams for not being division winners by having to play an extra game and burn good starters and bullpen arms.
Before going to the second Wild Card team, MLB was wrestling with the success WC teams were having and were throwing around all sorts of ideas, such as going to a 2-1-2 or 3-1-1 Home/away format for the division winner… the second WC was the fix… it does not need fixing.
I suppose the original system without playoffs was the “fairest” but the league wants to emphasize entertainment value, and who can blame them? The current system is plenty exciting, with the right mix of incentives for winning your division and fairness for good/great non-division winners to maximize that return.
Change the season to 160 games, end three days earlier and, voila! There’s your 3 game playoff.
I get that a one gane playoff is unfair to the yankees, but I think what people forget is that it’s even more unfair to the Red Sox. If the playoffs started today Boston would win the division by 9 games. That’s tied with the Indians (who play in the garbage can that is the the AL Central) for the largeat lead in baseball. The Red Sox gained this division lead in part because they won the games that counted most, namely, their head to head matchups with the Yankees, including a recent 4 game sweep. So while it’s crazy for a 100 game winner to have to play a single elimination game, it’s even crazier that if they win that one, solitary game they will earn a shot at dethroning the team that finished so far ahead of them. The Yankees win 1 game and the previous 162 are thrown out the window, and Boston is forced to beat them again in an environment where small samples reign supreme. Is the play-in unfair? Yes. But so are wild card berths in general, as well as the very nature of a playoff tournament in the first place.
Was going to post something similar. The more “fair” you make it for Wild Card Team 1, the harder you make it for the team with the best record in a league. I don’t see that as fair.
As others have said, the real problem isn’t the wild card, it’s the unbalanced schedule and unbalanced divisions.
Usually, the system works as it should, meaning that the two wild card teams have the 4th and 5th best records in the league. When it doesn’t work out this way, though, the results can be kind of egregious. It’s one thing to see a division winner with 93 wins, and a wild card team with 94. Quite another to see a situation like 2015, where the two NL wild cards had the 2nd and 3rd best records in all of baseball. Similarly, if the 2018 season ended today, all four Wild Card qualifiers would have a better record than at least one team in their league.
Punishing the second Wild Card further isn’t the answer; the Oakland A’s have a better record than every NL team right now, for example. It simply makes for bad baseball when inferior teams (meaning, teams that won fewer games in the regular season) consistently are disadvantaged in the postseason. In the absence of radical realignment or schedule changes, I’d rather see MLB seed the postseason teams based on record. If the two wild cards have the worst record, then let the system play out as it does. But if a division winner has an inferior record to a wild card team, make the weak division winner play the do-or-die game. You can “reward” them for their division win by having home field in that game.
I appreciate the dialogue about the WC team disparities and how to handle it.
But I think we are attempting to break an unbroken problem. How often do two 100 win teams reside in the same division? 93 Giants and Braves? Guess what, Giants would have killed for a 1 game playoff.
I feel like so much more is made of it because it is the “poor” Yankees. The real issue is the competitive imbalance creating a separation between awful and elite, that is artificially creating these 700 win pct. Teams are too incentivized to tank right now.
I would still like to see the season broken in 2 where if you lead your division or the wild card at the all star break, you get a spot in the playoffs (make the break at exactly the season midpoint). If you win it again in the 2nd half, you get a bye. If not, you play whoever won your spot in the first round of the playoffs
Oh poor Yankees. I feel your pain.
I think the KBO solution would simply be more fun. An extra game to watch! What’s not to love from a fan perspective or from MLB ticket sales?
The one game playoff is fantastic. If you don’t like it, win your division, plain and simple.
The league as a whole likes it overall. The casual baseball fan loves the drama of the one game format. And of course, the winning team of the game likes the format…
So everyone likes it except the losing team…
It’s kind of like playing credit card roulette for a drink tab with a bunch of friends …everyone likes it except the one who loses!
Having said this, the 5 game DS needs to be 7 games…
I think the whole thing is nonsense.
The point of the regular season is to prove what teams are championship worthy, and this obsession with artificial divisions takes away from that. And the previous system had it down pat. While no system will advance every worthy team and no unworthy teams, letting 4 in for each league was an ideal number, as it rarely left out a big time championship contender and didn’t often let in a limited team. And it made the silly division stuff okay, because it let in one team from each division (offering value to “winning the division” by granting such an outcome an automatic playoff berth).
That left just one spot for a Wild Card team, which often was better than one or both of the other division winners, and gave a fair, minor demerit for losing the division by automatically giving the team homefield disadvantage, even if the WC team had more wins than the opposition.
This system worked very well. It was about proving that your team deserved a shot at the championship, and then every qualifier had an almost equal shot at advancing.
Now, instead of this system being about proving the best legit teams, the system is rigged in a funky way that increased funky outcomes. Worse, the second WC team is not-infrequently quite a bit inferior to the rest of the playoff teams, and so often the legit WC1 team undeservedly has to fight for its playoff life, after which it has to play at a disadvantage in the next round.
So the solution is to go with something even more funky? Really? If baseball wants to truly get it right, to honor the spirit of the goal of the regular season, it would go back to the previous system. And if having more teams and honoring division winners is the goal, expand the leagues by 1 team each (16 total), go back to 2 divisions, and then have an NFL-style playoffs in which the two division winners get a “bye” and the four WCs have to play a best-of-1 or 3 game series to advance. That would be more about getting hot/lucky in the playoffs and less about simply proving your worth in the regular season, but at least it would make a little more sense and add one more playoff team to the mix (6/16 would still be a good ratio).
How is the seeding of the Yankees the driving force behind reformatting the postseason? I’m lost on why increasing the certainty of the WC outcome (in Travis’ suggestion, we’d be more than doubling it) is beneficial, unless predictability somehow makes the game more interesting.
With the standings as they are now, the Yankees would host the A’s as the heavy favorite: the FiveThirtyEight probability model (since that’s where Travis is headed) would give the Yankees right around a 67% chance of beating the A’s BEFORE pitcher adjustments, which will only increase their chances. Under the suggested NPB format, the A’s chances to advance fall from 33% to 16%…because the Yankees remind us that things should be more fair.
As much as I find it absurd to reformat the WC in a way that improves the Yankees’ ALDS chances from 67% to 84%, being proactive about something that effectively reduces the A’s chances from 33% to 16% seems criminal.
The Yankees are really good, so a 2 in 3 chance of advancement isn’t good enough…we should make it twice as hard for whoever they play to advance, and that’s a great idea because predictability is sure to make the postseason more interesting.
I get that it’s not always going to be the Yankees and A’s here, and the respective probabilities will obviously be different in every matchup. But by reformatting the WC in a way that makes it twice as hard for the 2nd-seeded team to advance is ridiculous regardless of who it is.
Totally agree 1 game is a crap way to decide anything. May as well just make a 3 game series imo.
If you’re going to give the better wildcard team a huge advantage in the WC series, why stop there? Should we also find some system where the Red Sox can beat the Indians without having to play a totally unfair best-of-7 game series, with home field advantage their only constellation for their superior record?
The only reason this is an issue is because its the Yankees. And they only have a 3 game lead on the Athletics, so it’s not like it’s some David v. Goliath matchup…well, maybe it is since the A’s payroll is a fraction of New York’s, yet they still can’t put them away.