No, realli! What does this mean?
What skills define a MLB team as good - those that add up to the most success over a long season, or those that enable it to win one or more short series? A lot of the requisite attributes overlap, but a bunch of 'em don’t.
It used to be pretty clear - up through 1968, winning the most games in the long season got you directly into the Series. During the 1969-93 period, that imperative was weakened only slightly: you had to win two short series, not one, to be world champion - but you still had to win more games than anyone else in your division, over a 162-game season, to get to those short series in the first place.
By expanding to a third layer of playoffs, and adding a wildcard entry, MLB has substantially tipped that balance. Each additional level adds one more chance for a ‘better’ team (in terms of the regular season) to be knocked off by a ‘worse’ team (ditto). But doesn’t that just mean that the lords of the game are saying that ‘good’ doesn’t anymore mean regular-season excellence, so much as a combination of regular-year adequacy and short-series ability?
Especially when you look at the effect of the wildcard, which says that you don’t need to be the best in your division, anymore, to go on - which has the effect of telling teams that more regular-season wins than about 90, give or take, will generally be superfluous.
What this says is that if the M’s were designed in a way that resulted in those 116 wins, in a way that left them less than fully prepared for the multilevel chaos of MLB’s postseason, then they weren’t ‘better’ than teams that won fewer reg-season games, but had the right combination of talents for a succession of short, single-elimination series - by the standards of the sport itself.
Of course, this is exactly the combination of circumstances that has caused me to lose interest in the game during July and August, because the way it is now, there’s no point really in a regular season that’s longer than about 100-120 games; the last 40-60 games really don’t decide much of importance. But while that’s a related rant, it’s separate enough that I’ll stop there.