Now that the Oakland A’s have finally sunk below that last horizon, it’s time for me to insist upon acknowledgement for my keen insight. In this thread I wrote:
At the time I wrote this, the A’s were 27-39 and I looked like a lunatic for even suggesting such a turnaround. (In fact, the A’s had just started to turn it around, having won four of the previous five series, but at that point it just looked like a brief surge.) Given the way things turned out, I almost look like a prophet.
(I qualify that statement because I only said their run was possible; I didn’t actually predict it.)
With a couple more wins in their remaining (now meaningless) games, the A’s will exceed the 86 wins I mentioned previously, giving them a nice successful season and a good foundation for future success.
Frankly, I think I deserve some dap for my wisdom. I await your accolades.
That’s good work. Now, I noticed somebody called the AL West the “most boring division in baseball,” so I’m guessing nobody expected the NL West to be the historic shithole that it is. (Congrats, Padre fans… you didn’t deserve it the least. ;))
Let’s be realistic about baseball’s playoff system. It doesn’t reward the team that’s been the best team all year, but rather the team that gets hot in September. The Padres didn’t exactly get “hot” in September but they did play the best ball in this pathetically weak division. They deserved their win because they were marginally better than any of the other clubs in that compost heap of a division. Rail against a system that rewards mediocrity not the team that did what they needed to in order to play in October.
Does this mean that the Padres are going to go three and out in the NLDS? I remember back in the 70s where the Mets won the NL East with a record only 3 games better than .500. Commentators spent all September bewailing the fact that no team in the divsion looked like it would finish the season at .500. They won their playoff games and then took the Big Red machine to 7 games before losing the World Series. A mediocre season does not always mean a mediocre October.
What are you talking about? If it’s the team that gets “hot” in September that goes to the playoffs instead of the best team all year, then San Francisco should have gone instead of San Diego (SF 15-11 in Sept., SD 13-13). No team in baseball has been hotter than Cleveland in September but they’re still sitting 3 games back of Chicago for the NL Central - although they may get the Wild Card if Boston doesn’t start winning.
I don’t know what “dap” is–I just heard other people saying it and I wanted to seem cool…
I come down on the side that the current playoff structure does not reward the best team(s). When you slice up the leagues into smaller and smaller bits, it’s inevitable that inferior teams will reach the postseason. They only have to be just a bit better than the other teams in their division, not on a par with the heaviest hitters in the league.
Conversely, you also get a lot of “runaway” division winners with the three division set up. (I wrote an article about this a few years ago for SABR’s yearly publication, and at that time I found about a 10% increase in runaway champs with 3 divisions vs. the 2 division set-up. Nothing I’ve seen since then would indicate a revision in those numbers; witness the Cardinals this year, and the Braves have never been seriously challenged since mid-season.)
On top of all that, the playoffs have become way more of a crapshoot with the wildcard format. Look how often the team with the best record in the league has NOT made it to the World Series in the last decade or so. I think it’s unfair–these teams have proven themselves over the course of 162 games; why make them jump over further hurdles to get to the Series? If you keep throwing obstacles in their way, even the best teams will eventually stumble.
So yeah, the Padres might get hot–or match up well with a particular playoff opponent–and slip through to the Series. That’s the roll-the-dice nature of today’s playoff system.
I think the answer is obvious: scrap the divisions entirely, go back to a top to bottom league, and let the regular season be the deciding factor again. That’s the only way you can guarantee that the best team gets to the championship.
Unfortunately, nobody wants the best team to win the championship except the fans of that team. Everyone else wants their team to win and they don’t care if they sneak into the playoffs with a sub-.500 record or through the Wild Card. More playoff slots equals more hope, although, you have to be careful not to have too many slots and make the regular season completely meaningless like the NHL and NBA. I think MLB got it about right, although, I’d like them to scrap the “no teams from the same division in the first round” rule.
Just for fun though, here would be the World Series matchups since the 1995 season if your idea were re-instituted:
1995: Cleveland vs. Atlanta
1996: Cleveland vs. Atlanta
1997: Baltimore vs. Atlanta
1998: New York vs. Atlanta
1999: New York vs. Atlanta
2000: Chicago vs. San Francisco
2001: Seattle vs. Houston
2002: New York vs. Atlanta
2003: New York vs. Atlanta
2004: New York vs. St. Louis
2005: Chicago vs. St. Louis
Pretty boring unless you’re a Yankees or Braves fan…
I know I don’t want to see that, and I’ve been a Braves and Yankees fan for about a dozen years. It’d be awful and boring. You simply cannot have a straight-to-the-WS format when it’s a 30-team sport. Put more teams in the playoffs, make October more exciting. I think eight teams is fine. My attitude toward sports is kind of “you make it if you deserve it, if not, you didn’t deserve it.” A tautology, sure, but there you have it.
As far as the best record goes: the Cardinals are not in a great division; there are two good teams in the NL Central. The Pirates are awful, and the Reds are pretty bad. The Cubs and Brewers are .500 teams, give or take, although the Cubs fell out of contention long ago and I don’t think the Brewers were ever a serious threat for the playoffs. That’s part of why the Cardinals have the best record, and it does not mean they deserve a free pass to the World Series or even the NLCS. (Yes, in part those teams probably have bad records because they played the Cardinals, but it seems they were not good against anyone else either.) As it is, they’ll play the Padres, which is a near-free pass. The Braves are in one of the toughest divisions in recent memory; all five teams may finish above .500. At worst, they’ll all be close. Are the Cardinals inherently more deserving? They’ll get homefield, and that’s about all the reward they deserve, I think.
One thing that makes zero sense is the rule that says a team cannot play the wildcard in the first round if they are from the same division. Put the best team against the worst of the four playoff teams, or pit them against the wildcard - either one is probably fine. The division-rule exception is stupid.
It seems like it would be pretty boring, if the records played out the way they did (referring to Neurotik’s reckoning). But, in a no-division format, those wouldn’t have been the teams with the best records, because the schedule would change: no unbalanced, division-oriented schedules, everyone plays the same schedule, every team in the league gets the same shot at the same weaklings, everyone has to play the powerhouses the same number of times each year. The Yankees have benefitted tremendously from having relative weaklings Tampa Bay, Baltimore and Toronto in their division, just as Chicago this year reaped the harvest of playing in the AL Central, with the Twins declining and Cleveland getting off to such a slow start.
Furthermore, the records would change because teams who did not finish first in the league would have a far greater incentive to make real changes to improve their teams. Look at the Giants: last year they almost won the NL West. They mostly stood pat, then saw their performance slide because of injuries and age. If they’d really bulked up their lineup and pitching, they could have run away with the NL West, even with Bonds injured. Instead, they treaded water until it was too late to catch the Padres. It’s the same with many of the teams out there: third or fourth place teams within a given division have little incentive to make a strong move to improve their clubs, because in most cases with the three division format, first place or the wildcard is always tantalizingly close to their current record. If you’re going to finish 9th in a 14 team league each year, you’d better damn well do something to improve, or you will be playing in an empty stadium from May 1 onward. No fans, no revenue, no hope.
This is all academic, but interesting to run through as an intellectual exercise. We’re stuck with a flawed but mostly acceptible set of circumstances. So it goes.
Well, to answer your question directly, because it’s a lot more entertaining this way. MLB is, after all, in the entertainment business. It’s still being decided on the field in any event, and frankly, the three-division format has delivered a lot of good, solid entertainment value. We’ve had a lot of terrific division series, more pennant races, more teams with a chance to win.
I actually think baseball has the BEST playoff system of any major sport, by far.
First of all, what is that an answer to? Your perception of unfairness? So what? The championship structure is what it is; it’s perfectly fair as long as it applies equally to all teams. What the “best team” is cannot logically be determined outside the championship structure. Sure, the team with the best regular season record might not beat their opponent in a short series, but in major league baseball, the champion is not wholly determined by regular season record, and hasn’t been since 1904. Heck, even in a full regular season the breaks don’t even out; the Red Sox really were a better team than the Yankees last year, if you believe the sabermetricians, who would would out that New York was very lucky to win as many games as they did. So maybe the playoff structure in fact brought some justice in 2004.
A top to bottom league, to be very blunt, would be absolute shit. Everyone would hate it, a huge numbers of fans would be turned off, and MLB’s popularity, revenue and future prospects would drop like a stone. I’m the biggest baseball fan I’ve ever met, and I would utterly despise such a plan. It is not a good idea to allow there to a sixteenth-place team.
My opinion is, yes, it is unfair to have such a long season, to have a franchise put a team together for the long haul, to have that team prove its worth over six months, come out on top, and then have to prove themselves all over again, in long series after long series after long series. But whatever. Nobody really seems that interested in this stuff, so no big deal.
Also, regarding: “The championship structure is what it is; it’s perfectly fair as long as it applies equally to all teams.” That’s kind of my point, the fallacy here being that it applies equally to all teams. It doesn’t. The unbalanced schedule and interleague play mean that different teams in the same league–even different teams in the same division–play a different schedule (different no. of games vs. common opponents, different sets of home and road series, different sets of opponents for wildcard competitors [for teams in a cross-division race for that last playoff spot]). You really need the playoffs to decide who is the best team because those differences in schedule practically guarantee that one of the division champions got that way because of an easier schedule and/or weaker division (i.e., is not of the same championship caliber as other division winners). Hence, your 2005 San Diego Padres. I don’t see that as a fabulous well-designed system.
But I’m not going to go throwing any Molotov cocktails around in order to change it. I’ll just go home and watch the games.
(This, by the way, is hell and gone from Cartegena, as far as my opening topic goes. I just wanted to point out that I was very perceptive about the A’s back in June. I’m just going to let this go.)
And back onto that topic, I think 2006 will commence another run of A’s division championships. Boy, that team is loaded with young talent. They need to dig up a better catcher and they’ll be ready to go.
It seems to me the teams on the rise in the AL are clearly Oakland, Cleveland and Toronto, more or less in that order. And in a few years, if they don’t muck it up, you might see - don’t laugh - Tampa Bay make a run or two. Lots of young bats on that team.
Hah! They’ll probably win a couple, but I think that they are going to have a tough time with the Angels. The Angels have a farm system that is absolutely loaded with front line talent. Kotchman will replace Erstad at first possibly next year, definitely in 2007. McPherson will be healthy next year now that his back impingement has been removed. Middle infield won’t be an issue with Kendrick, Wood, Callaspo, Aybar ready by 2007 (although we may have to disappear Cabrera - that was such a dumb signing). And the Angels have Mathis likely ready to go possibly next year, definitely by 2007. Plus a bunch of young pitching talent and a management team that has been exceptionally savvy in picking their pitching talent and creating depth on the bench. The Angels also have the pockets to bring in front line free agent talent when needed (although Stoneman hasn’t done particularly well in that regard).
Frankly, I’m looking forward to it.
Oh, you think Cleveland’s on the way up, do you? What makes you say that?
Looks like the Twinkies run was a quick blip and the Indians will regain their dominance in the AL Central for a while now. I think Chicago took all the wrong lessons out of this season and won’t be in contention next year. Tampa and Toronto are going to have their window open in 2006-2008 probably as the older contracts of the Yankees and Red Sox take their toll and their young talent comes into their primes. I only hope they’re ready to take advantage.
Then isn’t it unfair to have a postseason at all? I think it’s fairer if you add in the playoffs, where you eliminate the weak teams and force the best to play each other.
I don’t know exactly what it is, but I know Michael Wilbon (Washington Post, ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption) says it sometimes. It seems equivalent to “props.”
