Does the best team win with MLB expanded playoffs?
For just the fourth time in 54 years, Major League Baseball is making significant alterations to its playoff format. Yet in a sport that prides itself on the sanctity of 162-game regular seasons, that's frequent enough to provoke reactions ranging from skepticism to panic.
Come October, baseball's postseason will look nothing like it has before, a vast departure even from its last alteration in 2012. The gates will be flung open wider than any season, with three wild-card teams from each league joining the three division winners.
The wild-card games are dead, replaced after a decade-long run, by bestof-three series in which the higher seed will host all the games. And the top two division winners in each league, in a nod to regular season achievement, will receive first-round byes and await the survivor of the top two wild-card qualifiers in the Division Series.
It is all very un-baseballey as we knew it, what with seedings and byes and the fulfillment of commissioner Rob Manfred's desire to marry a playoff format with the modern fan's love of brackets. Manfred and the owners, in fact, aimed for 14-team fields before collective-bargaining talks with players yielded an expansion from 10 to 12 teams.
And little wonder. While the game's unwritten rules may evolve, players may never cede their undying respect for the grind – and their worry that a too-loose playoff format may infringe upon its meaning.
“I'm always concerned it gets watered down and becomes like the other sports, where the playoffs is such a long ordeal,” says Arizona Diamondbacks closer Mark Melancon, who has reached the postseason with three franchises. “I think it's pretty special when you really, really have to earn it. It makes that 162 really valuable.”
As baseball's postseason grows, it's worth pausing to ponder if baseball's playoffs have and will continue to serve their purpose.
In short, does the best team in baseball win the World Series? Do expanded playoffs reward the greatest teams, or the hottest ones?
And after nearly three decades of the wild-card format, should we re-think the apparent legacies of franchises we've deemed October failures?
It used to be so simple: Win the pennant, and you're in the World Series.
Oh, there were no divisions, far fewer teams and for a long while, no West Coast travel. But the major leagues in the post-World War II era, which saw integration and expansion deepen the game's reach, seemed ripe to reward regular season machines and budding dynasties.
For a five-season stretch from 194751, the team with the best regular season record also won the World Series – four championships for the Yankees and in 1948, Cleveland's most recent title.
And from 1966-68, this era closed with the 97-win Orioles, 101-win Cardinals and 103-win Tigers backing up their regular season superiority with World Series championships.
Then, divisional play began, and the Commissioner's Trophy became far less of a sure thing.
While no one's clamoring for a return of two, 10-team leagues (that'd now be 15 each) and a postseason that ends sooner than a Netflix miniseries, the correlation between regular season greatness and a World Series ring has diminished.
From 1946-68, with just two teams involved, the team with the game's best record won 12 of 23 years, or 52%, a bit better odds than a coin flip. When divisional play was introduced in 1969 and the field doubled to four teams, that number was cut by nearly half – to 28% (7 of 25).
And somewhat surprisingly, those odds remained virtually identical with the introduction of the wild card in time for the 1995 postseason, as the regular season wins king claimed the World Series in just seven of the past 27 postseasons, or 26%. That includes the last 10 seasons that featured two wild cards per league with a play-in game for nine of those years, and an expanded 16team field during the pandemic-stricken 2020 season.
Along the way, some great teams fell short of a title.
The 1980 Yankees equaled the '98 and '09 Yankees with 103 wins – and won more games than their '77, '78, '96 and '99 champs – yet lost the ALCS to Kansas City. The Braves had 101-win teams tripped up by wild-card winning – and eventual champion – Marlins teams in 1997 and 2003.
The 2001 Seattle Mariners equaled a record with 116 wins – but could not put away a 95-win Yankee team in the playoffs. And the existence of the wild card permitted the 93-win Nationals into the 2019 tournament, where they vanquished the 106-win Dodgers in the NLDS and 107-win Astros in a sevengame World Series.
Best team wins? Depends on your definition.
“If you look at 2019, our Nationals team, I don't think, was better than that 2019 Dodgers team,” says Daniel Hudson, now a Dodgers reliever who was part of a six-man Nationals pitching crew that absorbed almost all the highleverage spots in those playoffs. “But there was something going right for us that year. All of our starting rotation was pitching well at the right time, we were hitting really well at the right time.
“If you look at win-loss record and actual roster construction, I bet you a lot of people would say that the 2019 Dodgers were better than the 2019 Nationals. They might say the 2019 Astros were better than the 2019 Nationals. I think it's just the beauty of this game. We were playing well at the right time and ended up being the best team in baseball that year, regardless of record.”
Charlie Morton, the Braves' 38-yearold starter, has witnessed the modern postseason through virtually every lens, beginning with three consecutive trips to the wild card game with the Pirates, winning Game 7 of the World Series with the 2017 Astros and advancing to the 2020 Series with Tampa Bay after the pandemic-shortened, expandedplayoff 2020 season.
Last year, his 88-win Braves found new life late in the season, stormed into the World Series and, almost as stunningly, won it after Morton suffered a broken foot midway through his Game 1 start.
Morton's diversity of experience has only clouded his perception of postseason fairness.
“Does the best team win the World Series?” he asks, repeating a question posed several minutes prior. “I don't know how to answer that question. It's really subjective.
“By the World Series, most issues are ironed out. You're seeing two teams going at it and it comes down to will. A lot more than it does in April. Because of what was happening within the (2021 NL East), we were able to iron out a lot of stuff. It happened organically.”
Atlanta's 88 wins were the fewest by a Series champion since the 2014 Giants rode a wild card berth to a third title in five years. Yet the Braves also won the NL East for the fourth consecutive year, and the title felt more like a breakthrough than an accident.
High-achieving teams are hopeful that the more inclusive format does not permit too many lightweights to crash the gates.