I liked the move to 1 wild card, and consider that system to be among the best possible.
My favorite system would be to have two leagues with no divisions. Best team in the regular season in each league gets a “pennant” or something of that nature, and the top 2 teams in each league play for the right to be in the World Series.
But money is a thing, so they want to get a larger number of teams in the postseason, and more divisions so there is more artificially created “excitement.” Basically, if you have more than 1 division in each league, I think you have to have a wild card or else you introduce the possibility of unfairness. Just look at the 1993 San Francisco Giants, the second best team in baseball. They missed the playoffs, and are credited with being a major impetus toward implementing the 1994-2010 system. Also, the 1984 example mentioned earlier in the thread was a great one.
I’m not in favor of 1 game playoffs to decide playoff entrants, unless absolutely necessary, so needless to say I am not a fan of this current system. My hope is that we have a season where the top 3 teams in a given league are in the same division, and 2 of them have to play a 1-gamer whereas the other two inferior division winners get to play in the playoffs proper.
That was great. The last time we had something like an old-fashioned pennant race between two great teams. Undiluted drama down the stretch. Nothing in any regular season since can quite compare.
Maybe this is semantics, but the situation of the division winner is the same, while the position of the second best record is worse. I would call it adding a disadvantage to someone else, not giving anything to the division winner (who is still stuck with a short 5 game opening round series).
And I’m not convinced it helps them at all in winning that series. It could even hurt.
Extra off days which take a team out of its routine are not necessarily helpful. Last year the Nationals had 3 straight off days while the Cardinals played 1 game in those 3 days. Is 3 straight off days better? Eh. And of course, any longer wild card series to make it less of a sick joke would give way too much time off to the division winners.
Preparation for the playoffs? Actually, the opposite can be true. It is possible for a division winner to still be fighting for the division while the 2nd wild card has already clinched. This means the 2nd wild card gets to rest players with nagging injuries down the stretch and set up their pitching, while the division winner battles down to the wire and is unable to rest players or set up pitchers. Yet another advantage given to the worst team. The fact is, if you are going to expand the playoffs then you have to deal with the top team clinching early. Artificially forcing them to keep playing hard, while bad teams can still clinch early, is ridiculous.
I agree with this.
The basic point I am making here is that adding divisions and expanding the playoffs is your real problem, not the wild card. We could have 8 mini-divisions with only the winners making the playoffs, and it would neither be fair nor as exciting as the classic Braves and Giants race.
Once you are set on more, smaller divisions, and more playoff rounds, it doesn’t make sense to leave out the second best team in baseball anymore. That went out the window when you expanded.
To give an example for something I said in the last post:
In 2010 with a 2nd wild card the Braves would have clinched a wild card (and only a wild card) while the Giants were still fighting with the Padres for the division. That could have given them an advantage against the Giants in the opening round. In reality, the Braves had to keep playing hard because they weren’t guaranteed a 2nd wild card, and the Giants beat them.
Sorry to triple post, but I just thought of an even more hilarious way the NL Central could go this year.
What if either the Reds or Pirates go on a losing streak, while the other gets very close to the Cardinals?
Then in the final series, only the top 2 teams will have a reason to play hard. The worst team of the 3 may have an incentive to lose, in the hopes of keeping the top 2 teams close. So the worst team would rest players and prepare for the playoffs (which they already clinched) while the top 2 teams in the division battle down to the wire.
If you want pennant races between great teams to be a thing, you need to scrap the divisions. Otherwise you get huge feel-bads, like the Giants missing the playoffs with the 2nd best record in baseball, while a 6-games-worse Phillies squad ends up going to the World Series.
I admit, I do say that as a Braves fan. But I’d say the same if it had gone the other way. You can disbelieve that if you like, but it’s really true. Both teams were more fun to watch–indeed, were pushed to be greater teams–by the necessity of playing to be not merely good enough, but first.
No, there’s no conflict between pennant (or equivalent) races and divisions, particularly with unbalanced schedules (more games against in-division opponents). Before the introduction of “divisions” in 1969, we effectively had two divisions–the National League and the American League–with fully-unbalanced schedules (i.e., no interleague). Was it unfair when the second-best team in one league won more games than the best team in the other but didn’t go to the Series? No–and it would have been stupid to even make the argument, because records against different opponents aren’t comparable.
But then you can just argue we should get rid of leagues. After all, what did the 1954 Giants do to deserve winning over the 111-win Indians?
At some point you have to come up with a playoff plan that is reasonably fair and also entertaining. Having all 30 teams play a balanced schedule and then declaring the first place team the winner is absolutely the FAIREST way to determine a champion, but it’s also boring as all hell for most fans and, in some seasons, all fans.
The two-division system was vastly more entertaining but less fair. But it was REASONABLY fair. A few great teams, like the 1993 Giants or 1980 Orioles, didn’t make it, and of course the ALCS let teams win in 5 or 7 game what they could not win in 162 games. But generally speaking it mostly matched up excellent teams in the LCS.
In my opinion the 3+1 system of 1994-2011 was the best system they’ve ever had (although the unbalanced schedules, a separate issue, screwed it up a little.) It was very entertaining, and also reasonably fair, because while a few more bad teams made the playoffs that was balanced out by the second best team always being in.
Definitely agree on this point. People complained that the wild card took away a lot of the drama, but there were plenty of division races that didn’t have a wild card possibility. People also didn’t like that the wild card entered the playoffs on basically even footing with the other teams, but I think that’s a feature, not a bug; the wild card was usually the 2nd or 3rd best team in the league, not the 4th.
Because records are not comparable between divisions with unbalanced schedules,* strictly speaking there was no guarantee that the WC was even the fourth-best regular-season team.
This is feature not bug–this is what makes postseason playoffs to find an overall champion sensible in the first place.