Yes, I know this will never fly for many reasons <tongue-in-cheek smiley>. But when I watch teams that have had a consistently great season and they get beat for a couple of games by a team with a worse record, I wonder what any of the playoff series, or even the World Series, prove about which team is better. After all, the worst team in the MLB can beat the best team on any given day or maybe even in a series.
So let’s get rid of divisions and leagues and just have 30 teams that each play every other team 6 times for a total of 174 games (more games than the current 162 but you need that for the math to work, or drop back to 145). Whoever has the best record is declared world champs. Playoffs only if a tie.
The problem is that a team could clinch the title long before the season ends, in which case the whole thing ends with a whimper and it’s really shitty. Playoffs are dramatic and inherently not fair, it’s just a question of how much drama/unfairness we want. I would like baseball to weak the system some more to reward the best teams, but I’m not sure how. Ultimately, fewer playoff rounds and teams are more fair and I don’t think there’s any chance they’re going to reduce the number of playoff teams.
Baseball is entertainment. It’s not meant to be a scientific test of which team is objectively better.
It’s true that individual games and short series are influenced by bad hops, blown calls, and just bad luck. But even a team’s whole season can be messed up by bad luck by injuries. But that’s life.
We like the World Series because it’s drama played out over a short time to a definite conclusion. A season-long round robin wouldn’t offer that.
Doesn’t seem unfair to me as long as the teams aren’t too far apart. The Tigers would have one of the worst records ever for a world series winner, 88 wins in the regular season. 7 less than the Yankees. But even in a case like that, if the Tigers do win the world series they will have the most wins in the AL for the year (99 to the Yankees 98).
Also, I do think playoff games are more meaningful than regular season games, as it is a direct matchup (as opposed to facing different teams, different pitchers, different schedules) and there is more preparation for each team. It is totally subjective whether you want to weight such games more heavily.
Gosh, who wants to see Kirk Gibson’s homer or Joe Carter’s homer or Roy Halladay’s no hitter or Pedro Sandoval hitting three homers or Reggie Jackson becoming Mr. October or a comeback from 3-0 or the Edgar Martinez series or “Go crazy, folks, go crazy!” or “And we’ll see you tomorrow night!” or Bob Gibson striking out 17 men or Jack Morris’s 10-inning shutout or CArlton Fisk waving it fair or David Freese defying defeat or The Catch? That stuff doesn’t add much to baseball.
I wish to see a series where game 5 in Denver is postponed on account of snow, that is the whole point to having the playoffs tickling the edge of November.
I agree that the regular season should be more adequately rewarded, but I don’t think eliminating the playoffs altogether is the solution. I would prefer something like two leagues, no divisions, top 2 in each league play for the pennant. Next best would be two divisions, two division champs plus two wild cards make it. The current system is way down my list of preferable playoff systems.
Guys, this is toss-it-around-over-a-beer, not a serious proposal. I know all the reasons why things are the way they are, and I don’t necessarily think it’s bad. I think **Colibri **said it best.
Nationals. Best record in baseball at the end of the regular season
That would eliminate a lot more teams from the possibility of participating in the postseason.
I went and looked up how that would have changed things. Somewhat surprisingly, that would actually have increased the number of teams that made it to the World Series since 2000.
If it were just the top team in each league, 18 or 19 teams would have been in the World Series. (The Yankees and A’s tied in 2002, and that was the only time the A’s led or tied for most wins in the league. The Red Sox and Indians tied in 2007, but that was the only time either one led the league). In actual fact, 16 different teams have played in the series since 2000.
But nearly all the teams have participated in the postseason since 2000: 27 out of 30 teams. The only teams not to do so have been the Pirates, Blue Jays, and Royals.
The divisions were originally created to stimulate interest in cities that didn’t have good teams. As was said at the time, it’s tough to root for a team that’s in 10th place. It would be even harder to root for one in 16th. Now it’s impossible for a team to lower than 6th place (soon to be 5th place).
Ideally, I think, you’d have both, as in European football leagues. You can win the league, and you can also win the league cup, and both are taken seriously. And if you really want everyone to believe you’re the best, you can do the double. That way you get the drama of a game seven or an underdog win, but you can also say, hey, how about all that hardware Bobby Cox won.
The trouble is that the World Series is already a thing and it can’t be dramatically changed, so the “cup” needs to happen in October and has to be called the World Series, so MLB would have to somehow incentivize the regular season title in a way that people would take seriously, and I’m not sure that would be easy at this point.
I preferred the olden days when the pennant winners faced each other right after the regular season. That might hurt baseball with the number of teams now though. It’s already difficult enough to get attention for the series outside of the winning teams cities.
No, no and no. The problem with the World Series is that it doesn’t happen until October. Baseball is a summer phenomenon, and to have its games concurrent with football throws me into an affective dissonance that I find unbearable.
I say keep the Series, but it must finish before Labor Day.
Even with the unbalanced schedule inherent in the above, it came down to the final weekend (assumes +4 or less final margin) about 28 times out of 40, and the final week (+8 or less) 35 times out of 40, which isn’t too bad. I do agree with the overall argument (which is that there is no guarantee of final-weekend drama).
The biggest problem would the miniscule chance that the top teams at the end would actually be playing each other. If I became Commissioner, I’d strongly recommend going back to 4 divisions (leagues) arranged geographically, winner take all, no wild cards, seeded for the playoffs (which would both be 9 game series) according to record (1 vs. 4 and 2 vs. 3). I really miss old-style pennant races, and the endless epicycles which have been added to the NFL and now MLB to try to balance inherently unwieldly playoff systems just show how flawed they really are.
