I don’t think you can have a “truly deserving winner” unless you went back to the old (old) way of having the two teams with the best record in each league play each other. But I don’t think eliminating divisions in the leagues would work that well (no one really wants to ‘fight’ for 14th place).
Having one league table would also eliminate the ‘shitty teams’. However, one doesn’t really know how shitty a particular team is when they play most of their games within the division.
When teams play most of their games against their divisional rivals (2 to 3 times as many against teams from other divisions) how does one know which divisions are really more difficult than others? If you really want to make the argument of teams being better than other teams in other divisions, you would really need to make a schedule where every team played the same opponents. Is it really ‘fair’ that the San Francisco Giants made the 2nd WC by 1 game over the St. Louis Cardinals when it can be argued (though not definitively proven, of course) that the Cardinals had a more difficult schedule solely because they had to play their divisional games (19 each compared to 6-7 for teams outside the division) vs the Cubs, Pirates, Brewers, and Red rather than the Dodgers, Rockies, Diamondbacks, and Padres.
In that case you need to put a value on winning divisions, because schedules are so slanted in that direction. There is also pressure on not changing it to a balanced schedule due to the popularity of divisional rivalry games.
It may be helpful to recall what the baseball postseason originally was: a contest between teams from entirely ‘unbalanced’ (non-overlapping) schedules. The 1905 Pirates had a better record than any team in the American League. The 1964 White Sox had a better record than anybody in the National. But these, and several other such teams in the span between them, didn’t play in the postseason at all.
Would it be a “truly deserving” contest, that could exclude the second-best team in all of MLB?
Yeah, if the Leagues only played teams from their own league (the old old way) - then the teams that won their league would be a deserved winner playing the the champion of the other league. Just because someone finished 2nd best in, say, the NL with a better record than the AL champion, wouldn’t mean that they were a better team - they never played anyone in the AL to showcase that. Maybe the AL teams were better as a whole?
No-one needs to convince me of the problems inherent in having different divisions and leagues, and an unbalanced schedule. If you want a reference point for what i consider to be the platonic ideal of sports scheduling, take a look at the English Premier League soccer competition.
A perfectly balanced schedule. Every team plays every other team exactly twice: once at home, and once away. At the end of the season, the team with the best record wins. No divisions, no playoffs, nothing.
I understand that something like this would never happen in baseball, for a multitude of reasons, but it would actually be possible to have something pretty close.
There are 30 teams. So, if every team plays every other team five times, that gives us a 145-game schedule. You play some teams three times at home, and twice away, and other teams twice at home and three times away. If you really want to keep a 162-game season, make it so that you play some teams six times (3 home, 3 away) instead of five.
Again, i understand that this is never going to happen. But there’s no reason why it couldn’t work.
This is, for me, literally the worst possible outcome of the current post-season scenario. About the only thing that could be worse, or at least as bad, is for the Giants to win again. Of the ten teams still alive, eight of them have not won a World Series in at least two decades. It’s those teams i will be cheering for. In fact, my first priority in the current postseason is for the Giants and Red Sox to be eliminated as soon as possible.
I admit I’m this way that way about it, and at times I like it and at times I don’t. The inclusion of more teams in the playoff race is a good thing, IMHO.
I LIKE playoffs. I would like the LDS expanded to seven games. In my ideal world MLB would have forty teams, not thirty, and four full rounds of playoffs (you’d have to reduce the regular season so as not to be playing into November, and I’d be fine with that - unless everyone in the north can get a retractable roof, and then yes, please, November baseball.) More baseball, please. You cannot give me enough baseball.
I like the Sox on paper against Cleveland. If they advance to the ALCS, my fear is they might have to play Toronto with all those right handed power hitters. The Jays are the team I’d least want to face as a Red Sox fan.
So, as much as I dislike Buck Showalter and as fun as a Toronto/Texas rematch would be, I have to root for the O’s tonight.
I admire anyone who can not only pick the winner of a series but can, three or four weeks in advance, pick the winner of a specific game.
Yesterday my better half asked me what the Jays’ chances were. While I think they are likely to lose tonight simply because they have a bad starting pitcher and Baltimore has a good one, beyond that the truth is that any given playoff series is very close to a tossup. There aren’t any bad teams in the playoffs. Every series is a playoff team against another playoff team. If you put the Red Sox up against the Minnesota Twins in a seven-game series I’d want to place a big bet on the Red Sox, but teams like the Twins are making tee times now.
I mean, I guess I can see why Barkis would rather the Sox play Baltimore than Toronto; they did a little better against the Orioles than they did the Blue Jays (and a little, little better against Texas, too, but small data sample.) But the difference isn’t really that vast and hell, it often doesn’t matter if there is a big difference; there’s lots of examples of teams just beating the living crap out of some other team in the regular season and then rolling over in a playoff series against the same team. MY go to example is always the 1983 NLCS. The Dodgers were 11-1 against the Phillies in the regular season; in those 12 games the Phillies scored only 15 runs total. (!!!) The Phillies clobbered them in the NLCS.
Which was my point, in the other thread talking about schedules and records.
The original logic of the baseball postseason, in a sporting sense, was to test teams that had won out against different schedules, different opponents, directly against one another. Because that was the only way to definitively say that one was the best of all; the respective regular-season records were not–could not be–decisive.
This logic is lost when you have both subleague divisions and a balanced schedule between them. But it is largely restored when teams play their divisional opponents (and other opponents in common with them) more often; records across divisions are, again, not strictly comparable. We don’t really know yet whether this year’s Red Sox are better than the Indians or the Rangers; their record is a step worse, their schedule looks tougher, but how much so? That’s why we ‘need’ the AL playoffs.
People generally enjoy having multiple teams in the postseason, and a few rounds of playoffs, right? Multiple divisions with unbalanced schedules provide a sporting justification for this. Or, the other way round.
The big thing that I keep on coming back to is that if you have a 162-game season, it should settle as much as possible. I can understand why the NFL has a lot of teams in the postseason: the difference between 11-5 and 9-7 is a couple of good or bad breaks. If you have one team with each record, which is really the better? 16 games isn’t enough to fairly settle the issue.
But 162 games are enough, and more specifically, more qualified to settle the issue of who’s best than a short playoff series is. I’ve been on both sides of this one: I was rooting for the Braves in 1993 when they edged the Giants, 104 games to 103, in what I still regard as The Last Pennant Race Ever. I was rooting for the Red Sox in 1978 when it came down to Bucky Dent’s pop fly over the Monster in Game 163. And I was rooting for the Orioles in 1982 when they took it to the last game with the Brewers. The Brewers won, finished 95-67, and went on. The O’s lost, finished 94-68, and went home.
If you have a wild card, you can reverse the outcome of the 162 games in 5 or 7 games, with the second-place team over 162 games being better over 5 or 7. Why play 162 games if they aren’t going to be decisive?
And those examples bring me to the second thing, the emotional power that went with those pennant races. They mattered because the winner went on, and the second-place team didn’t. That can still happen - not in a strong division, but rather in a division where finishing second means you’re at best the sixth-best team in the league. Those pennant races were like a drug that I’ll never get another hit of.
OK, now the fairness issue. Yes, being second in the strong division (back in the days of 2 divisions in each league) meant that you might well have a better record than the winner of the other division. So? You had a worse record than the best team in your own division. Sure, it sucks, but if you’re not the best team in your division, then you’re not the best team in baseball, so why should you have a chance at the Series?
Any system you come up with is going to be unfair in one way or another. I was a lot happier with the unfairness of a team with 100 wins (e.g. the 1980 Orioles) ending their season while the 103-win Yankees and 97-win Royals went on, than I am with the prospect of a division winner losing in a short series to its division rival that it beat in 162 games.
Not saying I’m right and you’re wrong, because ultimately it’s just a matter of how we each see things. But that’s why I, at least, preferred the way it was up to 1993. 162 games should matter way more than 20 or fewer. And, dammit, I’ll never get another hit of that drug that made even being on the losing side of a pennant race such an emotionally powerful experience. I still crave it after all these years, but the withdrawal will never end.
It seems to me that the first two paragraphs i’ve snipped here are fundamentally contradicted by the third.
If you really do want a 162-game season to “settle as much as possible,” then why are you so untroubled by the possibility of an 84-win team making to the post-season ahead of a 92-win team, just because the former happens to be a little bit better than the other teams in an arbitrarily-allocated division?
This is demonstrably untrue, as i’ve already demonstrated. It would, in fact, be possible to have a very balanced schedule where, with a few tiny and insignificant differences, every single team basically played exactly the same number of games against every other team.
The main impediment to this is tradition, the long history of leagues and divisions and rivalries. I’m not arguing that we should ignore tradition, and i understand why baseball fans like leagues and divisions and rivalries, but the fact that those traditions get in the way of a properly balanced schedule does NOT mean that creating a properly balanced schedule is impossible to do.
RickJay, i definitely agree with you about a 7-game LDS. I also, despite my arguments for the EPL style of determining a champion, really like playoffs, in baseball and in other sports. I’m not sure i agree about the expansion of the playoffs; one thing i liked about baseball was that the limited number of playoff slots made that long 162-game grind really important, and i thought 8 teams was plenty, but i guess that two more isn’t the end of the world.
Talking of expanding the playoffs, if they’re going to have a Wild Card playoff, like they do under the current system, i’d also support the idea of making that series three, or even five games, rather than one.
Some idiot threw a bottle of water at Kim while he was trying to make a catch. He’ll be banned from. Rogers Centre for life. I wonder if he could face a minor criminal charge
