The Major League Baseball season is 27 days old, with 155 more to go before 22 teams head home at the end of summer. It’s time to talk about the playoffs.
Playoffs? Playoffs?!!
Yes, Jim Mora, playoffs. Go take some NyQuil. We already know you don’t care who you play.
Commissioner Bud Selig announced last week that expanding the MLB postseason is extremely likely, with the proposed changes taking effect at the end of the 2012 season. The expansion would qualify a second wild card team from each league for an abbreviated opening-round matchup with the existing first wild card team.
The new system would, in essence, be a play-in series with two wild cards vying for a spot in the Division Series.
“The more we’ve talked about it, I think we’re moving inexorably to that,” Selig said at his annual Associated Press Sports Editors meeting. He also called 10 a “fair number.”
Fair? Maybe. Fairer? Yes.
Of the “big four” sports leagues, MLB has the most restrictive qualifications for postseason play. More than half of the teams make the NBA and NHL playoffs, and three of every eight NFL squads play a 17th game. Only a fourth of National League teams make the playoffs in a given year. The percentage is slightly higher in the American League, which has two fewer teams.
Keeping a postseason system selective helps maintain the integrity of the game. But simultaneously, the threshold for making it to the Promised Land has to be low enough to make playing 162 games worthwhile.
There truly is no perfect playoff system. Even before the wild card was introduced, the Kansas City Royals made the postseason with a 50-53 record during the strike-shortened 1981 season, and the Texas Rangers were leading the AL West with a 52-62 mark when Selig ended the 1994 season because of another strike. The adoption of the wild card only came about after the San Francisco Giants missed the postseason despite winning 103 games in 1993.
The proposed expansion still is more reactionary than preventative. Since the 1995 debut of the wild card format, 19 teams have missed the playoffs despite finishing the regular season with a better record than a division-winning team in the same league. In 2005, three NL East Division teams failed to clinch a postseason berth despite finishing ahead of the NL West-winning San Diego Padres, which crashed the playoffs with a paltry 82-80 record.
With only one losing team ever to have advanced to the postseason, the MLB runs a much higher risk of excluding top-notch teams than including chumps.
The main concern with expansion is being able to finish the World Series before annual blizzards begin in Major League cities.
A one-game playoff between wild card teams seems brisk, but a three-game series is enough to make the expansion worthwhile. The last thing MLB needs is a postseason format resembling the NBA “fun, fun, fun, fun” playoffs. With two extra teams, the interest level, revenue and competition of baseball come October will be well worth the trouble.
— Michael Stainbrook is a sophomore studying journalism. You can email him at ms229908@ohiou.edu.
