The Sports Fix : MLB Postseason

In this edition of The Sports Fix we focus on the format and scheduling of the Major League Baseball Postseason.  About two weeks ago the NBA re-formatted their playoffs and it made me think that baseball should also re-think how they do things in the postseason.  The NBA playoffs make a ton more sense now, but the way they did it makes no sense (Top 8 teams in conference make the playoffs regardless of division.  Great for getting the best teams in, but why have divisions now?).  Okay, that is WAY too much NBA discussion.

Anyway, let me start by saying the double Wild Card in baseball is silly.  And yes, I realize that last year the 2^nd Wild Card team, San Francisco, went on to win the World Series, but that isn’t changing my opinion.  You have 162 regular season games for a reason, if you can’t get into the Top 4 in your league, then you probably don’t deserve to be in the playoffs.  There is no need for the Wild Card Game except to sell an extra playoff game to owners and add it to the TV contract.  So even though there are about 7,851 reasons not to have the Wild Card Game, money talks and it ain’t going away any time soon.

My first change to the MLB Postseason is changing the idea of the “wild card” team as an automatic road team in their 1^st series.  Why punish a team for finishing with a better record than a division winner?  Or maybe the better question, why reward a division winner for winning a bad division?  This is the 4^th year of the Wild Card game and it will be the 3^rd time in 4 years that one of the winners of that game will have a better record than one of the division winners.  With my format, I would simply seed the remaining teams AFTER the Wild Card Game 1 through 4 based on their regular season record.  This still give the division winners a pass into series play, but now it rewards the wild card team for what they did in the regular season.  This gives the wild card winner a chance to avoid the top team and if they were really good in the regular season, it would give them the ability to host a divisional series.  If the goal is to get the best two teams in the World Series, this is the best way to do that.

And if the goal is to get the best two teams into the World Series, one can assume that it is also to crown the best team as World Champion.  To do that there must be a change to the scheduling in the playoffs.

We saw last year with Madison Bumgarner and his amazing post season run that a pitcher can dominate an entire postseason simply because the schedule allows it.  That shouldn’t be the case.  Teams play 3 and 4 game series with a 5 man rotation all season only for that to change in the postseason, when teams play 2 (sometime 1) games before getting a day off.  The Giants played 17 playoff games (including the Wild Card Game) and Bumgarner was able to start 6 of them and pitch a 7^th.  This wasn’t because Bruce Bochy rushed his ace out there on short rest either.  Bumgarner had his normal rest between every one of his 6 start.  That was because the Giants played those 17 games over 29 days.

Here is how we change things.  This season the playoffs begin on October 6^th with the AL Wild Card Game.  Game 7 of the World Series is scheduled for November 4^th.  I am fine with the mid-week wild card games, I like it actually.  I also am fine giving a day off after the wild card game before the start of the divisional series.  That travel day is needed for the winner of the Wild Card Game.  That is about all that I like about the current schedule.

In the Divisional Series you should play the 1^st 4 games without a day off.  Yes I realize that there is a travel day between games 2 and 3, but guess what? Both teams make the same trip, there is absolutely no advantage for 1 team over another.  This gives the 2 teams a true 4-game series.  If the series is still tied after 4 games, I would give 1 day off before game 5.  This is for both travel and to allow the aces for each team to pitch in the deciding game.

I use the same idea when scheduling the League Championship Series too.  However, this series goes 5 games before either team has a day off.  That forces teams to use their entire rotation (just like they would in the regular season) and it eliminates 1 travel day.  There would be no day off between games 2 and 3 even though the series moves cities.  An off day for the 2^nd travel day once again gives each team a breather and allows both coaching staffs to get their pitching staff in order for the final 2 games.

The World Series would be identical to the LCS’s.  Also the World Series would NOT be determined by the mid-season exhibition that baseball likes to call the All-Star Game (sorry Bud Selig).  I would just rotate back and forth between leagues like it was done for 100 years before Bud screwed things up.

This scheduling doesn’t eliminate November baseball (that is for another Sports Fix at another time), but it does force the teams to play the playoffs the same way they played the 162 games that earned them a spot in the postseason.

These changes may seem minor, but they would certainly help baseball from dragging the season out any longer than it already has to.  It would also help crown a true champion that would be determined using the same standards and methods as teams use from April through September, rather than changing them for the most important part of the season.