The solution, like in all sports, is to do away with divisions. Preferably leagues too, but divisions are unnecessary constructions. We have planes. All divisions do is add variance by allowing for unbalanced scheduling which becomes especially unfair when wild cards are introduced and when the reward for being the best team in the league throughout the regular season is a likely matchup against the second best team in the league when eight teams still remain.
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Hard to fix playoff inequities unless you go back to 1968 when the American League regular season champ played the National League Champ in the World Series with no other playoffs in between. Even if they took the top 4 teams from each league, you’d still have the problem of the top teams cruising and not trying depending upon their positions. There may be no close battle for that final playoff spot.
I think the best fix is to make it a three game wild card series, even including a double-header if necessary. I mean its taking forever to get to the first real round of the playoffs anyway. Charlie Morton started the last game of the regular season and he’ll be starting the first game of the playoffs.
Not sure why they dont jus reseed after the wild card game. There is no reason that SF/LA shouldnt be a potential LCS matchup this year
It’s way easier if you just seed the teams 1-8 based on record.
Division rivalries are what make sports fun imo. It’s one of the reasons the NBA bores me.
Expanded playoffs are coming and likely next year with the new CBA. The league & owners want it which means they’ll eventually get it, so debates about the playoffs remaining small are entirely academic at this point. ESPN has apparently purchased the rights to the “first round” of MLB playoffs that don’t exist yet. If MLB expands to 32 teams with 4 divisions per league (something the league has expressed interest in), we will almost certainly see a 16-team playoff. Again, this is a business and entertainment product first and everything else second.
If that were true 106 games would have won the division.
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Oh I don’t doubt they’ll do it some day. I just can’t imagine preferring it.
Right, it’s completely arbitrary and inequitable, yet there’s some serious anchor and adjustment effect happening where people talk about the importance of WinNiNg yOuR DiViSiOn, and how rewarding teams who don’t is some egregious violation of the sanctity of sport. Just fucking LOL @ appealing to divisions when this alignment recently existed for 15 years:
It makes a lot more sense in a sport structured like college football, but in modern professional sports it’s an anachronism and (bad) appeal to tradition. Predictably you’ll see these arguments from bow-tie blowhards like Ken Rosenthal and similar sanctimonious sports Boomers with terrible opinions:
[Speaking about the 2020 MLB expanded playoff]
I would not be in favor of that particular format going forward, because it did not reward the division winner, it did not reward the best overall record – any of those teams could’ve lost right away in that Wild Card round.
Going forward, what has been discussed, is a 14-team playoff, seven in each league, in which some of those things I just mentioned — home field advantage for the division champion, penalizing the Wild Card, best overall record gets an edge — that will all be taken care of ….
And I expect that, in the new CBA, as part of the give and take that will take place, not just with the DH, but with all the things that are going on, the union will agree to expanded playoffs ….
Not sure what’s he’s talking about because the division winners received absolute home field advantage in the first round. The remote sites afterward were clearly a one-off thing due to the pandemic, but again, the baked assumption here is that we should care about divisions for [reasons]. Also, the weird fascination with penalizing teams seems truly bizarre and gimmicky. If they are worthy of playing, then just let them play. They are already “penalized” by being the worse team and by not having home field advantage. Ken Rosenthal wants to take a crowbar to their knees and then serve them up to a hungry and rested anaconda lying in wait which I think says a lot about Ken Rosenthal and his “ideas” about sports.
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The six Central teams was a travesty and I cannot believe they did that for as long as they did.
eh, divisions are pretty important, not just travel logistics but without rivalries there’s no point for any of the sports in the first place.
The simplest change is that division winner isn’t automatically protected as a seed. ie, so the braves would go to the giants.
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You can still have rivalries without divisions. Maybe not in like football because they don’t play enough games but the Sox and Yankees will still hate each other even if they play 10 times a year instead of 19
I’ve had a day to reflect on my position on this. And I would like to say - Boo fucking hoo. Teams with a half a $billion payroll have to play a one and done. IT’S NAWT FAYOWR!!!
You know what isn’t fair? Teams like the Royals have to save their resources for one 3-4 year run every 15 years or so, then hope they hit on all their draft picks, and all their middling free agent signings turn into gold, and several other consecutive miracles have to hit, just so they can contend with the Yanks and SAWX for a couple fucking years.
It’s why the NFL is superior, and why I barely watch MLB anymore unless the Royals are good. I’m just not that stimulated by watching the Yanks and Dodgers rotations of 5 Cy Young winners battle it out every year. MLB is the most unfair league in American sports.
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+1 to this.
Baseball needs a salary cap. There’s a reason the Yankees dwarf all other all time championship frontrunners in amount of hardware won compared to next on the list.
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THATS SOCIALISM!!!
I’ve always found it ironic that European sports are just the opposite.
In the NFL, if your team sucks one year, your consolation prize is the best college QB for next year.
In European soccer, there are no salary caps, the jersey has a giant corporate logo on the front and if your team sucks, well then fuck you, you’re out of the league. Have fun in the second division.
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You are just proving the point here: you aren’t watching baseball because your interest is solely tied to your team that doesn’t have a chance. The fact that they don’t have a chance becomes more obvious to you much sooner in the season because (1) fewer teams qualify for the playoffs and (2) they play a preposterous number of games. If the Royals are 20 games out at the ASB, you know they aren’t coming back, whereas if the Chiefs are 2 games out half way they could easily still make it despite these numbers representing the same % of regular season games.
Lol no it isn’t. There are more unique World Series winners (14) in the past 20 years than Super Bowl champions (12) and NBA champions (10).
This just further demonstrates how terrible MLB has been at designing and marketing their own product. NBA is the one experiencing rapid growth and has the least amount of parity. Try to process this completely unbelievable headline:
Report: Mike Trout as recognizable to Americans as NBA’s Kenneth Faried
This is just preposterous and a huge failure to design a product that appeals to more than regional markets. They should literally fire everyone. NFL and NBA both figured it out but achieved it in different ways. Meanwhile, MLB listened to fastidious bow-tie droners yapping about tradition instead of figuring out how to maximize appeal.
You’ll get no argument from me that Dodgers or Yankees stockpiling MVPs and CY winners is patently unfair. It is, but the difference is that money spent does not equate to win equity the way it does in football or basketball: you can buy all of those dudes and still very easily lose because no individual player is worth that much. Salary caps are not coming to baseball anytime soon, but playoff expansion can have a similar leveling effect. The MLBPA is afraid of expansion specifically because they’re worried that deep-pocketed teams engaged in the nuclear arms race will stop overpaying.