I can understand the problem in the case of the National League, because there’s a big difference between playing games in New York or San Francisco. I admit I don’t understand why you can’t schedule the first two games, since we know where they will be, but Games 3 and 4 of Cubs Vs. Mets/Giants, you don’t know.
In the case of the AL, I can’t. Baltimore and Toronto are in the same time zone. Which it is makes no real difference to Texas.
Don’t know how the Jays will fare but I agree with you. This is a distinct contrast with hockey playoffs where there are two wildcards in each conference, and all four wildcards join 12 division leaders in a best-of-7 first round.
That said, I appreciate the more compact playoff format of MLB – the above is the reason that hockey playoffs seem to go on forever, speaking about milking every possible dime out of the postseason – it’s silly to have 16 teams out of 30 always making the playoffs. But the one-game wildcard playoff in baseball is both high drama and a bitter disappointment for the loser.
Let’s go Mets! Let’s go Thor! Any win is a gift this year.
It’s unfair that Baltimore and Toronto get today off, whereas the Giants have to fly all the way cross country from San Francisco to New York to play a game tonight.
The NL Wild Card game isn’t until Wednesday.
Times announced for the NLDS: http://dodgers.mlblogs.com/2016/10/03/times-for-nlds-games-1-and-2-announced/
I guess my problem with the new Wild Card format is that it turned what used to be a way to recognize excellence into a way that punishes it.
When they went to three divisions, employing a wild card had a side benefit (the primary benefit being, of course, that you need four teams for a proper playoff format) - it ensured a really good team would not be left behind by virtue of being in the same division as another really good team while weak teams won weaker divisions. It was VERY common for teams much stronger than division champions to earn Wild Cards. Just in the AL, the '97 Yankees were better than two division champs, the '98 Red Sox were better than two division champs, the 2000 Mariners were better than the AL East winners, the 2001 A’s were better than two division champs, the 2002 Angels were as well… it happened a lot. Many outstanding teams were getting into the playoffs through the wild card.
The new format means that outstanding team now faces a one-and-done against a potentially vastly inferior team. Like I said we’d have had the same games this year anyway, just by coincidence, but then, that would have been kind of cool and unique. Instead it just is. Had Baltimore lost yesterday it would have made no difference at all.
Oh, great, thanks, this morning’s paper had it wrong. Whew.
If they were outstanding, they would have won their division. 
Announced starters are Chris Tillman and Marcus Stroman. Your dream is alive!
It’s like the Giants were chasing a train that was pulling out of the station, and jumped aboard at the last possible moment. But now that they’re on: anything can happen, including taking control away from the engineer.
You know what we used to call a really good team being “left behind,” eliminated, in the regular season? A pennant race.
In an ideal world, a team would need to win their division to qualify for the playoffs. But with six divisions, that becomes somewhat problematic. MLB could ‘fix’ the problem by adding two more teams and realigning into 8 divisions of 4 teams each (which may have its own problems), but for now the wildcard is a necessity. Being that it is, I think the current structure is the best thing; if you don’t want to have to roll the dice on a single-game elimination, then win your division. But if you have the best record in baseball in the first half of the season, then play like a AA team for three months, you just might wind up having to put your entire season on the line in a winner-take-all game against a Norse god…
Does this thread include news from after the regular season concludes? Because Barry Bonds is out after one season as Marlins hitting coach.
Ha-ha!
The problem is that you’d have to play your division opponents a lot more times for a division title to be meaningful. So we’d see the same teams over and over throughout the season, or we’d see inferior teams making the playoffs due to apparently arbitrary divisions.
Sigh. I miss those days. I remember when the world series would be starting about now, while there was still baseball weather in many parts of the country.
And you’d have worse teams in the playoffs.
If you go to a four-by-four format I absolutely, one hundred percent assure you that you’d end up with a team going 80-82 and winning a crap division while a couple of 93-69 teams get left out. Lower quality playoff teams isn’t really something to shoot for.
To illustrate this, take the NL when it was a 16-team league. We’ll start with 1996, the first 162-game year under that format, and realign it to four divisions. Without looking at the standings I’ll do it right now as best I can by geography:
NL East: New York, Montreal, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh
NL Humid: Atlanta, Florida, Cincinnati, Houston
NL Flyover: Colorado, Chicago, St. Louis, Milwaukee
NL West: LA, SF, SD, Arizona
So what happens to the standings? You get worse teams. Almost every year, a team with fewer wins makes the playoffs where a team with more wins would have in a wild card system. It’s not dramatically worse - the wild card system still gave us a few 82-win division champions - but it’s worse.
If they’re going to change anything, fixing the schedule so it’s fairer is the first place they should start, but that involves abandoning interleague play so God forbid they do anything logical.
I’d take the ‘worse’ teams in the playoffs if we brought back some pennant races and having to win your division to move forward (and yes, more balanced division schedules would have to be in place). I mean we already have some ‘worse’ teams winning World Series based on the division concept to begin with (2001 and 2006 immediate come to mind - as do any WS where a Wild Card won it). I think most of us already consider the playoffs a crap shoot where the best team doesn’t necessarily win.
But isn’t this precisely why, in the interests of fairness and a truly deserving winner, we should have a system that increases the likelihood that good teams will make the playoffs and mediocre teams will miss out? If the playoffs are subject to short-term luck and are something of a crap shoot—and i agree that they are—then surely it’s better to have a regular season structure that keeps shitty teams from being able to take advantage of that luck?
I’m not quite sure, either, what the obsession is that some people have with winning the division, while discounting strength differences between divisions. If the divisions were changed each year, and seeded to reflect team strength, that would be one thing, but as they currently stand, divisions are largely arbitrary constructions based loosely on geography. If Division A has a 100-game winner and a 93-game winner, and Division B has two 95-game winners, and Division C is won by a team that goes 84-78, what (non-arbitrary) reason do we have to support a playoff berth for the team in Division C over the 93-game winner in Division A?
Or, to look at it differently, what if there were a division, this season, made up of the Rays, White Sox, Twins, Angels, and Athletics. Would the fact that one of those teams is slightly less crappy than the others be, in your mind, a reasonable justification for putting them in the playoffs, just because those five crappy teams happened to be arranged together in a single group?
Look, i understand why people like divisions, and i understand that they aren’t going away, but when people reply to concerns about the schedule and about who makes the playoffs by tossing off the thoughtless “If you want to get in, just make sure you win your division,” it reflects a lack of thought about what the measure of a good team actually is.
As RickJay suggests, though, a lot of this is an issue largely because they can’t work out how to balance a fairer playoff entry system with other aspects of scheduling like a balanced schedule and the presence (or not) of interleague play.
I am interested though, RickJay, in your argument in this thread. I admit that my memory could be faulty, and a search of the boards so far doesn’t find what i’m looking for, but i seem to remember that, when the new Wild Card playoff system went into effect a few years back, you defended it. I remember disliking the addition of another team and a WC playoff game, and being surprised that you thought it was no big deal. Am i misremembering, or did you change your mind?