Bud Selig’s purpose as commisioner has been, apparently, to cause me to lose all interest in MLB baseball as a whole, as a unit. He hasn’t quite succeeded yet, but he’s getting there.
I’ll always love to watch baseball games, whether it be major, minor, independent, college, high school, little league, sandlot. My interest in the NL or AL as it pertains to following the season is dwindling fast.
A week ago, I cancelled my radio subscription after having had it for ten years.
Like everyone else I think the additional wild card is a fantastic idea. Wait everyone hates it? Guess this is going to be a longer post.
People keep bringing up fairness as if it is the point of a playoff system. If you wanted to have a fair system to choose a championship you would have every team play every other team the same number of times and declare the team that won the most the champion. Leagues, divisions, and even playoffs actively dilute fairness. There is not a sport I’m aware of that is designed to crown a fair champion. Rather they are designed to maximize excitement of both the regular season and the playoffs.
The problem with the wild card now is thus not an issue of fairness. In fact since inception the average wild card has won over 90 games, often having the 2nd best record in the league.(The average would be 2nd wild card team has won 88-89 games which still is better than a fair number of division winners.) Rather the problem is one of excitement. While it has caused exciting races between lesser teams, it has killed great pennant races between teams. Having the Dodgers/Padres or Red Sox/Yankees rest their players in the final games of the season with a division title at stake is a travesty. I remember fondly the race between the Giants and Braves in 1993, where the Giants stayed home despite winning 102 games. Does anyone think it would have been better for baseball if the Giants and Braves had nothing to play for over the last month of the season. It would have been fairer yes, but not better.
A 2nd wild card goes a long way to fixing this problem. Teams will now always care about winning their division, and will never rest guys merely because they have a WC locked up when the division is still up for grabs. Yeah on occasion the first wild card will occasionally be at a disadvantage when compared to the 2nd wild card team, but before 15 years ago they wouldn’t have even gotten. Bet those Giants would have wanted a chance to play a home game to advance to the playoffs.
While the first wild card may have diluted the regular season, the 2nd WC has no such effect. Winning a division will not change in value. In fact it will slightly improve as one division winner will get to play a tired wild card team, which probably just used its best pitcher. The playoffs still has 8 teams. It is just for those final two spots, there is a play in game.
I agree with this. Once the wild-card came in, the argument about who’s “worthy” to compete in the playoffs kinda went out the door. Adding another wild card doesn’t really affect that. I like that this one-game play-in idea gives real value to actually winning the division. Whoever comes out of the wild-card game will likely have used their best pitcher, so the division winner they face gets an advantage out of the box.
And isn’t that what we’re saying? Winning your division should give you an edge over getting in the playoffs as a wild card? Yeah, yeah, “second best record in the league” and all that, I hear ya. But it wasn’t all that long ago second-best in the league didn’t even get you in the playoffs, if you were also second-best in your division. So that doesn’t bother me. If you’re really that good, you’ll win that one game (in your own stadium, no less) over the poor saps who got the second wild card. Then anything can happen! Look at this year!
But that’s what I LIKE about the wild card. It ensures that a great team can make the playoffs despite being in a strong division. The 2004 Red Sox were the best team in baseball.
That’s the advantage of a wild card system; if, for instance, you were to add two teams and go to four 4-team divisions, you’d actually have - on average - worse playoff teams.
So that doesn’t bother me. If you’re really that good, you’ll win that one game (in your own stadium, no less) over the poor saps who got the second wild card. Then anything can happen! Look at this year!
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English Premier League Football.
Completely balanced schedule, in which every team plays every other team twice: once at home, and once away.
The winner is determined by the team with the most points at the end of the season. No playoffs.
And because of relegation and European league play there is excitement for most teams every year.
That said, without those it would be very boring for about half the season for most teams. So maybe fair and balanced isn’t really what we should strive for with MLB, I never thought of ot that way before…either that or institute relegation and something equivalent to the Europa League.
I think this is pretty standard throughout Europe.
15 years after screwing up their uniforms for no good reason, the Blue Jays finally fix the situation:
Excellent. I always liked the old uniforms.
I’m seeing it reported that HGH testing is part of the new deal. I think this is good news. (as per the The New York Times)
Of note min salary will now be $480,000. “As part of the deal, baseball’s minimum salary will go from $414,000 this year to $480,000 in 2012 and $500,000 later in the deal — matching what the average salary was in 1989.”
I think everyone already heard that “Owners gained one of their chief objectives: a restraint on the bonuses paid to amateur free agents, both those entering professional baseball from high schools and colleges and those coming to MLB organizations from abroad.”
The throw back uniforms for the Jays does look very good Rick Jay.
What are the relative attendance numbers between the four or five franchises that utterly dominate EPL and the dreg franchises that struggle around the basement/relegation point?
Wait, I can answer that. Perennially dominant franchises, like Man U or Arsenal or what have you, sell out every game. Also-rans, like Wigan Athletic, struggle to draw flies.
If there’s equivalent levels of excitement for the relegation level clubs, it isn’t showing up at the turnstiles.
I don’t see a shred of evidence a relegation system would increase interest.
I don’t know that that is true. Winning teams draw better, but as far as I can tell (and I am just a casual US fan, so what do I know) the relegation matches are some of the most hotly anticipated games of the season. At least last season they drew much more media coverage and fan discussion than the games where ManU clinched.
I am not saying MLB should institute relegation, I am saying that it is necessary to make a totally fair and balanced schedule interesting. Without relegation and European league contention the EPL would have been totaly uninteresting for all but 3 teams by about March of last year, and totally uninteresting for everyone about a month before the season ended.
I’m a big fan of the minimally expanded playoff schedule for reasons like those mentioned by Hawkeyeop. I think the Wild Card is great because it ameliorates the unfairness of living in a tough division. But as it stood so far, it ameliorates it too much; there should be a difference between a division winner and the team that gets in because of the make-up rule. Now there is.
The argument that the new plan treats two teams of unequal accomplishment equally has even more force in the other direction – as it is right now, teams are treated the same even though one of them is a division winner and the other is an also ran.
I think it’s going to generate more excitement, too – as RickJay says, there’s just as much chance of a race going down to the wire for fifth best team as there has been for fourth, but you’re also nearly guaranteed a nail-biter in the one-game first round every year, while the possibility of an off day or a few unlucky breaks means there’s a big disadvantage to being runner up in your division even before we include burning your ace.
The thing would be less attractive with a balanced schedule, because then the unfairness of the tough division would be less (though non-zero). But I think this playoff system plus an unbalanced schedule threads the needle – you have to roll with the punches of a tough schedule but aren’t foreclosed because of it.
I also like even leagues; “lopsized” divisions discombobulated everything. Of course the ideal solution is to go to 36 teams (208 game schedule! Spring training starts Nov. 7th!) but I understand there aren’t enough places to put them. The only thing I’m wary about is interleague every day. I like interleague play, but in part because of the novelty. I do sorta worry about constant interleague meetings blurring the leagues, which would be a huge mistake, because whichever league you favor (even if you’re one of those Junior Circuit goobers) the fact that they both exist is critical. It allows maintenance of an audience that’s already diverse in its preference for style of play and it gives fans the opportunity to take a trip to the other side from time to time for variety’s sake.
–Cliffy
Not pretending they tied. Saying they qualified.
Cliffy:
Just curious: Why do you see 36 as ideal rather than 32? Is 6/6 better than 4/8? Do you see 4 teams as just being too small for a division?
So you don’t have any problem with two teams in the same division, with a 10+ game gap between them, playing a one-game playoff? Look at that 2001 example. Why should a team with 102 wins have to play an 85-win team to get into the playoffs? That’s just ludicrous… one game tells you nothing about the relative quality of those two teams that the previous 162 games didn’t already tell you.
My proposal: add that second wild-card if you must, but that team has to be “wild-card eligible”. I would put that at 90 wins, but could be talked into another number. That should eliminate some of the most egregious problems, while even adding a potential new race to the end of the season - the race to 90 wins.
So this year Boston would have made it, but not Atlanta. In 2010 the Padres would have made it, but not Boston. No second wild-card in 2009.
I could get on board with this, although it will never happen.
In other news, Mariners rookie Greg Halman was stabbed to death, apparently by his brother, on a trip home to Holland. That’s pretty fucked up.
So the winner of that tough division proved that it was a better team over the course of 162 games. Why should the loser get ANOTHER chance to get to the World Series?
It is similar to football in previous years where the Steelers would beat Baltimore twice in the regular season, win the division, and still be forced to play them again in the playoffs? Didn’t they do enough in the regular season to show they were the better team?
(And just so nobody accuses me of Steelers partisanship, the roles may reverse this year)
I understand that playoffs are about TV revenue for the leagues, but could they at least say that instead of pretending that this is somehow more fair to the team in a tough division? How do we know the division was that tough? Maybe the other division winner had a lesser record but played stronger divisional games where teams beat each other up?
We don’t know, so we match these teams in the playoffs. Likewise, in different leagues, we didn’t know if the AL team or the NL team was better, so they played. The wild card team has already lost through the test of the season.
But the teams that played each other back in April aren’t really the same teams that match up in September or October.
If a team is in contention, it’s going to be trying to improve itself over the course of the season—through trades that hopefully address weaknesses and make the team stronger, through giving rookies increased playing experience, and through determining which players are playing the best and rewarding them with increased playing time, or playing them in roles where they’re particularly successful. Ideally, a team will be at its best at the end of the season. Of course, they may not be, due to injury or exhaustion, but baseball’s a game of endurance (physically and mentally) over the course of a long season.
Anyway, that’s my devil’s-advocate argument for why the regular season doesn’t necessarily show definitively which are the better teams.
Justin Verlander wins the AL MVP award in a split vote. Jacoby Ellsbury finished second, just ahead of Jose Bautista. Curtis Granderson finished fourth. Verlander received 13 first place votes, Bautista got five, Ellsbury got four, Granderson got three, Miguel Cabrera got two, and Michael Young got one.
I’m still iffy on the idea of pitchers for MVP, but not as much as I used to be. However this does remind me that giving the award to Eckersley in '92 was really stupid.