My guess is that baseball is just more random, or at least seemingly random, than other sports. It could be that the level of talent between the best and sixth best team in MLB is smaller than the talent difference between the best and sixth best NFL or NBA team, so the results would seem more random. Or it could be that there really is more “luck” involved in winning a baseball game than a basketball or football game.
I agree that 2 seasons of this new format is too small a sample size to draw any conclusions so far.
That being said, this is just my opinion, and possibly an unpopular one …
Given how weak baseball’s homefield advantage is compared to other sports, maybe MLB should take a page from Japan’s Climax Series and make the Division Series involving the top seeds a 6-game series where the top seed starts with a 1-win advantage (but with home fields alternating in a 2-2-1-1 pattern, unlike the Climax Series where the top seed gets home field advantage for every game).
The Division Series featuring the 2nd seeds can follow the usual Best-of-5 format.
That sounds like a terrible idea to me. If you manage to get into a series, you should start off equally. Someone has to be home, but that’s a minor advantage given to the top seed. A one game head start changes everything dramatically.
The top seed has to win 3 games (given their one game head start), while their opponent has to win 4 games. So yes, it’s somewhere between a minor and major advantage, but I feel that’s a more equitable reward to the top seed for actually trying hard during the regular season and possibly ending up with 20+ more wins than their opponent in the series, than merely a piddling home field advantage for 3 of the games in the series.
Part of the randomness is something that’s been mentioned before here - pitching. There might be roughly the same responsibility to their side of the ball as a quarterback in football, but there’s no other sport where a guy comes in only 1 out of every 4 games. Part of that is playing every day, and part of that is having a position that is very demanding on one specific part of the body in a way that makes it take more time to recover than the rest of the team needs to recover.
There is also a great deal of timing and precision needed to hit a batted ball into fair play, not to mention hitting it where they ain’t, such that if you can do both 1/3 of the time, you’re in good shape for the hall of fame, while for most hitters you might expect one in four. With that kind of variance in hitting, it’s rather random how many runs you’re going to be able to manage to string together even if the pitching were always the same quality.
I wish they’d stop expanding the playoffs, but I’m sure it’s mostly a money thing, because the playoffs are bound to be watched more than the regular season (and probably fetch higher ticket prices too). I really wish they’d bring back the days of going straight to the LCS from the regular season, because those 162 games should really be enough to determine which teams are most worthy. Yes, put them back into 2 divisions per league; why are we continually cheapening division titles in every sport? They should get rid of these piddling 3 and 5 game series and go back to the 9 game series they used to have way back in the day. I’d even advocate for best of 11 in the World Series, but they won’t have time for that before the frost comes if they have all these extra rounds.
But I haven’t really watched a baseball game for 20 years, so what does what I want matter?
If there’s such angst over seeing teams with the best records fall to “inferior” squads in the postseason, we might as well ditch playoffs altogether and go straight to the World Series with only the top team in each league competing, the way it was up until 1969.*
*there was much griping that year from traditionalists like sportswriter Jim Murray of the L.A. Times, who was outraged that the Mets upset the Orioles in the Series.
That would be very unobservant of him, seeing as how under the previous system, the result would have been exactly the same. The Mets had the best record in the National League by a wide margin.
But the Orioles won 109 games in the regular season, 9 better than the Mets and were widely regarded as a much superior team, with stars like Frank Robinson, Boog Powell and Brooks Robinson, plus an unparalleled pitching staff led by Cuellar, McNally and Palmer. It just wasn’t right (according to Murray, anyway) that they should be beaten in 5 games by the Mets.
There doesn’t seem to have been quite the same reaction in previous years when juggernauts got upended in the World Series, like when the 111-win Cleveland Indians were swept by the N.Y. Giants in 1954.
You might have to go back to 1906, when the “Hitless Wonders” White Sox knocked off the 116-win Chicago Cubs to find similar shock and disappointment.
Eh. Even a near historic 109 win season means they lost 53 times. Winning roughly 2 out of 3 games is a historically good record in baseball. Likewise, the worst teams will still manage to win 50-60 games.
And those are the absolute best MLB seasons. A team is still really, really good winning 3 out of 5 games on average (~100 game season).
In the NFL, there will pretty much always be more than one team that wins 70 or 80% of regular season games.
As above, that’s the point of playoff expansion. If you give weaker (on average) teams more chances, ‘superior’ teams will get knocked out more often. If you don’t want that to happen, go back to the old system of awarding the league pennant
But the pre-1969 system would have resulted in the same matchup in 1969. It would have been Mets versus Orioles. I dunno, maybe people were disappointed the Orioles lost, but it didn’t have anything to do with the divisional system.
well as i posted in the playoff thread here’s where a bye was a good thing
could you imagine the NFL even on a half-MLB schedule playing every day or two?
Yes, but to play every other day they would need a roster size of 150 or so. Or maybe 200. Basically, every position would be treated like pitchers in baseball, where you play one game and then take several games off.
The bye didn’t factor into that.
Or the sport would simply become a completely different sport in terms of how it is played.