I don’t really get the outrage. It doesn’t remotely devalue winning a division. It doesn’t really change it at all. You still will need to win the same amount of games against the same number of teams to win the world series. In fact it will make divisions slightly more valuable to win because your opponent could be both slightly worse and slightly more tired. What it does do is decrease substantially the value of being the league’s best 2nd place team and increase the value of being the next best after that. While it may have made the padres/giants race a little less interesting, it would vastly improved the race between the Rays and Yankees for first. There needs to be an incentive to win the division rather than the wild card and this would provide that. It was also be good if there was an incentive to win the first wc over the 2nd, so I fine with ideas like making it a best of 3 where the top seed starts up 1-0.
Right, that was already done when the first WC was let in. Given that any non-winning teams are allowed to advance, making them face an additional qualifier restores a portion of the value of winning the division.
Oh hell no. Putting a nonexistent “win” in the books is really perverse.
There’s no empirical reason to believe that the first WC (the “best” second-place team) is better than the second based on RS records, unless they happen to both be in the same division. There has to be some kind of seeding, and basing it on RS record is better than something more arbitrary, but awarding a phantom win in a short series is way too much. A best-of-three series all in the top seed’s park is fine. A slight jigger in the schedule could fit that it without running the WS any later.
Here’s how you do it:
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One-game playoff is all you can afford, since a three-game throws off your top team(s)'s rhythm too much–you’d need at least two days to do a one-game playoff, three if you leave room for a tie-breaker preceding the playoff, and more than that gives the top team TOO much rest.
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Once you’ve established the identity of the playoff contenders (3 division winner, 2 best RS records among everyone else), throw out the other distinctions and seed them according to RS record. So if your teams are
Red Sox 98-64 (AL EAST winner)
NYY 96-66 (WC #1)
Rays 89-73 (WC #2)
Indians 88- 74 (AL CENTRAL winner)
Angels 86-76 (AL WEST winner)
that’s your seeding, which motivates even the Angels to play hard, though they’re the only team in AL West to finish over .500 and have had a safe lead in the division for the last week of the season. They’re busting their asses to finish ahead of the Rays and avoid the deadly single-game elimination contest. Meanwhile the Sox and the Yankees, who otherwise would be be complacent, having locked up playoff spots, are fighting to win the division and get an easier time in the playoffs, unlike now when they’d both be coasting the final few games.
The Angels play the Indians in the one-game playoff (in Cleveland) on Friday night, winner plays the Sox in Boston on Sunday afternoon. Meanwhile, on saturday, the Rays play the Yankees in NY.
The Sox get the advantage of 1) playing a team that’s had to go through travelling and playing for their lives, while they’ve been resting and getting their house in order, and 2) playing them at home, which is a big advantage but entirely suitable as a reward for winning their division and compiling the best record in baseball. The Yankees and the Rays get to play each other, which is tougher, but still fair since they had less impressive records than the Sox and finished behind them.
The Angels have it tough here, but if they can win the one-game playoff AND beat the Sox under those conditions IMO they will have earned their berth in the playoffs. And the Indians–well, they won their division but with an unimpressive record AND they lost their one-game playoff so they lose out, but they had a shot and they blew it. I don’t feel sorry for them.
This seeding will NEVER fly! There should be an incentive for winning your division. Unless of course you have an objection to divisions. Why not just lump them all together and take the top 5 teams.
There is. There are only two WC spots, so if the Blue Jays are 88-game winners, the Angels still get to make the post season on the basis of winning the Western Division, despite winning two fewer games than the Blue Jays.
Winning the division is better than not winning it! :rolleyes:
Ugh. First March Madness goes mad and changes the classic 64-team field to 65, then 68 teams. Then football wants to expand to eighteen games. And now this.
I didn’t mind the first wild card expansion. With three divisions, it really was the most workable solution. But this? You’re builiding in a disadvantage, arguably, for winning a division and pushing the World Series to Thanksgiving just to grub a few extra dollars. It’s so naked a money grab it should be arrested for exposure.
Will you greedy pieces of crap please leave the games alone!
The problem with this is the same problem college football has. If you have 3 good teams in one division they end up beating up each other and eliminating each other.
At first I didn’t think a second wild card was a good idea, but after reading some of the viewpoints here I’ve changed my mind. I agree that having a second wildcard team will actually make winning the division important again.
The season needs to be shortened back to 154 games to prevent games being played in Chicago and New York in mid-November or mid-March.
** Enfant Terrible**- How does this build in a disadvantage for winning a division?
It’s been mentioned upthread I think, but sitting around and waiting for a first-round series to finish could screw up your rotation, or cool off some hot bats. Momentum can be a factor in sports, to say the least. Though I did say arguably, since rest can also be a big plus in some circumstances.
Well, to say something positive about it, I like that a Wild Card playoff game or series gives a penalty to the WC team going into the Divisional round - at the very least it prevents them from setting up their rotation. I don’t like the current setup where the WC goes into the Divisional round on equal footing with a division winner. However I would absolutely get rid of the rule that prevents the WC team from meeting a divisional rival before the LCS. The division winner with the best record should face the WC team, regardless of divisional alignment.
But even with that caveat, I dont’ like adding another WC team. Keep it the way it is (except fix the seeding).
Of course I still hate interleague play, so I’m somewhat of a dinosaur.
Here’s what I would do:
The max number of post season games is already 26. Adding another wild card series at best of three brings the total to 29 post season games.
Cut 29 games from the regular season to 133 games.
This means you get the extra series and the World Series will end about when the regular season does.
Hear that, Bud? 
Which is why the Rangers, As and Mariners aren’t in prr’s list. You can dislike prr’s setup, but your reason is terrible.
Or just mandate more scheduled double headers.
Why is it “terrible” to say winning a division is better than not winning it?
It isn’t “terrible” to say that, it’s just that qualifying for the playoffs is all that matters in the regular season. That’s it. Once you’re there, it just doesn’t matter if you were a wildcard or not; you have about an equal chance of winning the WS either way. You could have won 88 games or 110, it doesn’t matter anymore.
That’s a fundamental change that going to division play created - it used to be that winning the pennant. over the course of a long season, was the important thing, and the WS was just a bonus on top of that. Now the word “pennant” is hardly even mentioned.
Proposals to substantially cut down the regular season, or to schedule very many doubleheaders, are non-starters. Owners will never accept the first, the players’ union never the second.
From certain perspectives, “throwing off” and disadvantaging the WC teams is the point.
Really awful. This ignores the fact that teams in different divisions are playing different schedules.
Your combined proposal means that a team that has proven itself in a tough division over the course of 162 games–a team that might in fact be the best of its league–could be bounced in just one game… while another team, established as not-the-best even in its division, gets extra rest and a five-game series!
I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you just haven’t thought this through, and you’re not actually trying to subvert and devalue both the season and the postseason!
If a team qualifies as the wild card AND is one of the best 3 teams in the league, thereby avoiding the play-in game, doesn’t that mean that their division was in fact the toughest in the league? Hell, there was a team in their own division that was better than they were! Whereas the division winner with fewer wins was the best team of its lot.
I know you probably envision a situation where there’s a division with a 95 game winner, a 92 game winner (wild card #1) and three 65 win teams, whereas the other division goes 91, 89, 87, 82 and 77 wins, but in reality these things don’t usually happen. There’s usually bad teams in every division, so a team that finishes gets the #1 wild card has a fair claim to being in the actual toughest division in the league.
Most people who are critics of expanding the postseason (like me) usually try to work within an assumed system. I assume they are going to expand to 5 playoff teams per league, so what’s the best system given that expansion? But if you really wanted my ideal system, it would be either the pre-1969 system (two leagues, two league winners, one World Series) or two leagues with two teams making it in each league, and the best team in the league having HFA in a best-of-7. This would restore some importance to the regular season.
No. You seem to still be using “best” to mean better RS record. If two of the league’s three genuinely best teams are in the same division, it’s fairly likely that both of them will have worse records than a strong team running away in a weak division.
The best system would be one that clearly rewards division winners above mere playoff qualifiers. In that sense, having two wild cards play each other before they get to play any division winner is an improvement over the current structure.
WTF? My proposed system makes it very hard on WC teams (or barely-above-.500 weak division leaders, sometimes) by compelling the weakest teams to play a one-game playoff and travel to play the strongest team the next day. It advantages the strongest team by giving them four days’ rest before facing (at home) the weakest remaining team who just won a do-or-die game and then travelled across the country (sometimes) to face them. How am I NOT advantaging the strongest, most deserving team under ths system?
So what? End of the day (or season) the most important, easily understood metric is “How many games did you win?” You want to balance schedules perfectly, knock yourself out. But you still need to win games.
WTF? Which team in my scenario above is this “team that has proven itself in a tough division over the course of 162 games–a team that might in fact be the best of its league”? By my measure, it’s clearly the the Red Sox, who have won the most games in the toughest division. Far from risking a one-game playoff, they are rested, at home, and playing a weaker and exhausted opponent.
I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you haven’t read my post carefully.
What other way COULD he mean best? :rolleyes: If a team REALLY is the best team, wouldn’t make sense that they have the best record? How else would you do seeding?
Because no one’s said it’s not worse. If it was, then why aren’t the Rangers, As or Mariners in the playoffs in that scenario?