Let’s say the Reds sweep the Pirates this weekend and the Pirates also falter against the Cubs next week. But the Nats lose enough to be eliminated.
The Pirates will be the 2nd wild card team and the Reds the first meaning the Reds would host the Pirates on the following Tuesday for the play in game. But the Pirates finish the season at the Reds for a 3 game, meaningless series.
Wouldn’t it be a mockery of the game to have two teams play three meaningless games, resting players and pitchers, shuffling around lineups only to do it for real in one game on Tuesday? Would there be calls for change?
Pennant winning teams have traditionally rested their starters before the playoff games (one example was in 1967, when the Cardinals had plenty of time to set Bob Gibson as the first game starter, but the Red Sox ace, Jim Lonborg, had to pitch in the final game of the season and thus went into the 7th game on short rest; Red Sox fans wondered what might happen if they went head to head). I don’t think this would be particularly controversial.
The Cardinals, Pirates and Reds are separated by only two games in the standings. At the rate the Cardinals have been playing lately, that Reds-Pirates series may well be for the division title.
In any case, why would it be any more of a mockery than when one team clinches the division and the other clinches a wildcard, or when one team is playing for a playoff spot and the other can only be a spoiler?
What about this scenario: regular season ends with the Cards winning the division and the Pirates and Reds tied at one game back. (Sorry, the Nats didn’t make it).
Do the Pirates and Reds have to play a one game playoff to decide the #1 wild card spot and home field advantage…for the one game playoff? If not, how would home field be decided?
If so, who gets home field advantage for the one game playoff to decide home field for the one game playoff? (my head is starting to hurt)
I assume they use a tiebreaker rather than a playoff. Since both teams are in the post season no matter what they don’t need to play a game to decide. The only place they play a one game playoff when both teams are in the post season is if decides between a division winner and a wild card spot. They didn’t used to but now the difference is so great (between a wild card and divisional winner) that they play a one-game for that.
Yes. Making a 3 game regular season series meaningless in favor of a gimmick 1 game playoff that matters is part of the reason the 2nd wild card itself is a mockery of the game.
To be fair though, the 2nd wild card was always supposed to make playoff races less exciting and more unfair. In return it was supposed to put more teams in the mix and force 1st place teams to play hard longer. The success of the 2nd wild card is that the Yankees and Orioles still have an outside shot. The failure is the races are more boring than they would be, and the regular season is downgraded in favor of a single gimmick game.
I agree. It would be different if the Pirates were playing the Marlins and the Reds were playing Houston. Yes, these teams would only be playing spoiler, but they are scheduled regular season games.
In the Pirates/Reds situation you have two teams where we need method to determine who is the better team. Baseball doesn’t care if, say, the Reds are 10 games ahead of the Pirates and sweep the season series, including the last three in Cincinnati…no, we need one more game, in Cincinnati, to determine the team that advances. That is a joke.
How about going back to the way it was before 1969 (or was it 1968) - the team with the best record in each league wins the pennant and goes on to the World Series; if there’s a tie, have a 2-out-of-3 playoff. Is that any less of a joke?
The thing about playoff systems is, they determine who the best team is at the end of the season - and some people think it’s unfair that the best teams at the end of the season may be left out because of a poor start at the start of the season. (This is one of the reasons the NCAA got rid of its “only conference champions can be in the basketball tournament” rule in the 1970s.)
As for “saving pitchers,” I was at a game about 40 years ago where the A’s started Vida Blue, then pulled him after something like three innings - and it ended up with four pitchers combining for a no-hitter.
What would happen if, by some bizarre series of events, the Cardinals, Pirates and Reds all ended in a flat-footed tie on September 29? How would they determine the division champion in that event?
I was just wondering about this the other day on my way to work. I know they use a tiebreaker and not a game to determine who gets the home field for the wild card game, but since they do play a game to determine a division winner … how would they solve a three-way tie?
This is a common misconception. The important change was MLB going from 4 divisions to 6. If you only have 2 or 4 divisions, it makes sense to just take the division winners. Going to 6 divisions waters down the importance of winning a division, not of the regular season. That is why a single wild card makes perfect sense, given there are a large number of divisions. It allows a team which achieves the 2nd best record in baseball (high importance of regular season) to make the playoffs even if they didn’t win their division (watered down importance due to large number of divisions).
I can definitely understand believing there should be less divisions again (thus making winning one more valuable), but ignoring that and complaining about the 1st wild card doesn’t make sense.
What makes even less sense is believing that the way to fix a 5 game series is not to make it 7 games… no. It is to keep it 5 games and add another “series” which is only 1 game. Are you serious?
How does that “make perfect sense”? If they have demonstrated, over the whole of the long season, that they are not the best team even in their own division, under what logic do they have a right to contend for a postseason, overall championship? Only if the regular season is considered somehow less than determinative.
I’m not complaining–just pointing out that the double WC format does make winning a division more valuable than the previous arrangement.
I would be in favor of making the DS seven games. But that doesn’t have much to do with the WC game.
The more divisions there are, the less special it is to win one. The move to 6 divisions happened at the same time the wild card appeared, which I think made people believe “the wild card makes winning a division less special” when mainly having more divisions made winning a division less special.
Imagine that instead of 6 divisions and 2 wild cards, they had made 8 tiny divisions and no wild cards. Would winning one of the 8 mini-divisions be just as special as winning one of the old 4? Would that be a good method of choosing a playoff field? Of course not, even though only division winners would advance.
On the contrary, as the number of divisions increased, the relative “specialness”, “difficulty”, “achievement”, etc, of having the 2nd best record in baseball increased. When there are few divisions, it is hard to win one. When there are many divisions, it is actually easier to win a division than to have a great regular season and finish with the second best record in baseball.
That is why the first wild card made sense. Winning a division became easier and more common, while finishing with the 2nd best record in baseball stayed equally difficult and rare. I would even argue that the 1st wild card increased the importance of winning a lot of games in the regular season, as compared to leaving everything up to (now smaller and more numerous) divisions, the composition of which was the luck of the draw.
This sort of thing has happened before, as far as was possible, In 1991 the Blue Jays and Twins finished the season against each other in a series that did not mean anything, knowing they would be playing each other in the ALCS. It was not a very hotly contested series, to say the least.
In the very last game of the series, of 18 men to start in the lineups of the two teams, 17 did not finish the game; every man but one (Twins third baseman Mike Pagliarulo) was lifted after a few at bats.
If I can follow up on Carmady’s point, the idea is that the wild card guarantees a higher quality of team in the playoffs. Subdividing teams into divisions increases the chance that an inferior team will make the playoffs over a superior one by virtue of the way the divisions are aligned.
The establishment of a Wild Card means that, at the very least, the best two teams in the league always make the playoffs.
In 1984, the five best teams in the AL were Detroit, Toronto, New York, Boston and Baltimore; the ALCS was contested between Detroit and Kansas City, who made the playoffs because, simply by random chance, the AL West had all the bad teams in it. I don’t see how that’s a particularly favourable outcome.
But if we can pretend like the playoffs are supposed to determine the best team in the league, then in 1984, we can eliminate Toronto, New York, Boston, and Baltimore because Detroit, through a 162 game “playoff” (and identical schedules with those other teams) showed that they were better than those teams. There is no need for Detroit to have to potentially win again against any of those teams to decide that question.
Kansas City is a different story because they were in a different division with a different schedule. Maybe they would have beaten Detroit given the same schedule. We don’t know, so let’s play the game.
A wild card just gives a losing team another shot at the title of the “champion” when 162 games didn’t show that.
The difference in schedule was insignificant; in 1991, AL teams played 13 games against in-division opponents, 12 against the other division. If you switch Kansas City and, say, Baltimore, their schedules would be barely different at all - far fewer games would be changed than the difference between Detroit and Kansas City in the standings, in fact.
The difference between Kansas City and Toronto/Baltimore/Boston was purely the geographically arbitrary definition of who was in what division. Had you broken the AL into Northern and Southern divisions the champions would have been Detroit and (I think) Baltimore. Or if you’d divvied them up by alphabetical order, Detroit and Toronto. Or by the age of the franchise, Detroit and… well, Toronto again, it was a boring year in the AL, but you could come up with years that mix it up a lot more.
If finishing first in a 162-game schedule is to mean everything, why have divisions? Why didn’t they just declare Detroit the American League champion and tell KC that 84-78 wasn’t good enough? Why give Kansas City a chance to get lucky for three games and eliminate a team that had just finished plowing the entire league for 162 games? Well, obviously, because the fans won’t tolerate no playoffs; you’re not going to get a lot of fans interested in a league where you have a 14th-place team. Adding divisions in 1969 didn’t make the game any fairer; many, many, many times, the league’s best team was eliminated by a team with a worse record. But it did make it more interesting.
If you’re going to go with 4 playoff teams per league, the advantage to using a wild card is that you are guaranteeing a higher calibre of playoff team; the league’s second place team will ALWAYS be in the playoffs. There’s nothing more or less fair about being the wild card than being the champion of a fourth division; either is simply an arbitrary assignment of teams into columns and picking whomever is on top.
To my mind that is the problem with the one-game playoff; now the second best team might NOT make the playoffs, unless you count a tiebreaker (which is what the WC game is) as the playoffs. A lot of genuinely first class teams have won the World Series out of the wild card; the 2002 Angels and 2004 Red Sox were absolutely top-flight ballclubs, and it would seem a shame to me to have not had those teams in the World Series.
I agree, although I do prefer having 4 divisions over the idea of just taking the top 2 teams in each league. It is only once you have 6+ divisions that the wild card becomes the logical answer.
I think 6 divisions and 2 wild cards is more fair than 8 divisions and no wild cards. As divisions are watered down and the playoffs are expanded, it no longer makes sense to say the 2nd best record shouldn’t be in the playoffs.
The second wild card doesn’t give much (probably zero) advantage to division winners over the previous system.
Ask the Nationals if they felt losing to the Cardinals in 5 games last year was an advantage. Ask if they felt playing games 1 and 2 in St Louis was a nice reward for finishing with the best record while the Cardinals failed to even make the top 10, in addition to losing their division.
What you mean to say is that the 2nd wild card adds a disadvantage to finishing with the 2nd best record in baseball, and an advantage to falling out of the top 10 while losing your division. Division winners are in the same situation as before.
Support for the 2nd wild card is based on several completely false assumptions.
The wild card made winning divisions less special? No, making more and smaller divisions made winning divisions less special. The wild card made it harder for the best team to win? No, making them face an extra round of playoffs made it harder. Winning divisions is a tougher achievement than finishing with a great regular season record? No, once the number of divisions increased, the relative achievement level of finishing with the 2nd best record became higher vs the achievement of winning a division. The 2nd wild card gives an advantage to division winners? No, division winners still get a 5 game first round playoff.
So the conclusion is that the 2nd wild card, in exchange for being a mockery of the game and making playoff races less exciting, also does not help division winners or the team with the best record at all. What it does is put more teams with worse years in the mix and make it more likely 1st place teams will play hard longer. It is certainly true that if the top two records in baseball were close and in the same division, they might have to keep playing hard while lesser teams in 5 other divisions could ease back and rest for the playoffs. But I don’t think that goal is laudable enough to justify all the downsides of the 2nd wild card.
And I’ll also add that time is a factor for the playoffs because of weather. Adding another “round” makes it harder to extend opening round series to 7 games, which was what they should have done.
It DOES help division winners! Implementing this system (which I despise) was to make winning the division actually meaningful. It gives the division champs an extra day of rest, allows them to set up their pitching, while the teams in the “play-in” game are usually burning their ace.