A price for expanded playoffs

Major League Baseball’s playoffs are about to get bigger. Whether they’ll be better remains an open question.

In perhaps the most significant onfield development in collective bargaining agreement negotiations that concluded Thursday, owners managed to achieve a longstanding goal: An expanded playoff field that will provide an immediate revenue boost to all 30 teams.

It will be a 12-team field, expanded from the current 10 but less than the 14 owners desired, and while the reported $65 million to $100 million ESPN agreed to pay to broadcast additional rounds of playoffs will fill the coffers of revenueravenous owners, it will come at a price.

Most notably: The meaning and relevance of a 162-game season that will result in 40% of teams gaining entry to the playoffs.

Baseball’s charm – and its greatest glories – have always been tied to the grind itself, a six-month crucible of a season that weeded out pretenders and rewarded sustained excellence.

To be sure, no player, executive or fan conditioned to the modern game wants to throw it back to 1968 and earlier, when only the pennant winners of the National and American leagues moved on, advancing directly to the World Series.

Now, it’s fair to question whether the cushion is too vast, that soft landings will be assured for pretenders, even losing teams.

A look at how the new playoffs might work, and some unintended consequences that may result:

The format

For now, MLB is not altering the number of divisions – there will be six, fiveteam divisions, though that may grow to eight and four should the league expand to 32 teams, as commissioner Rob Manfred has intimated is possible in coming years. All six division winners will earn playoff berths, but not all will get the advantage of rest they currently enjoy.

Instead, the division winners with the two best records will receive firstround byes, with the remaining division winner and three wild cards meeting in best-of-three wild-card series. The winners of those series would advance to the division series, and the playoffs as we’ve known them since 1995 (division series, LCS, World Series) would commence.

There are plenty of suboptimal details in the fine print, most notably that the wild-card round will be a best-ofthree format in which the higher seed hosts all three games. That will certainly result in multiple teams going home without playing a game in front of their home crowd.

And in order to facilitate a quick turnaround and avoid top seeds sitting out too long, tiebreaking games will no longer be contested to break deadlocks atop a division, or to determine the final playoff participant. So say goodbye to some of the most titillating baseball, courtesy of Game 163, played over the years. (Shoutout Bucky Dent).

It seems a bit incongruous to play 162 games and have a division title decided on, say, runs allowed in division games or net home runs in games against common opponents.

Punishing the great

The beauty of MLB’s wild-card game format – instituted in 2012 – was the significant emphasis it placed on winning the division. Additionally, it provided a punishment to non-division winners in the form of burning their top pitcher before moving on to the wildcard round.

But this format will undoubtedly bring some outstanding teams unfairly down a level – essentially, forced to contest an extra round (and a dangerous two-of-three, at that) despite proving themselves over 162 games.

Here’s a sampling of just a few outstanding division champs in the wildcard game era who finished with their league’s third-best record, and thus would have been forced into an unnerving (but moneymaking) wild-card series: 2019 Twins (101 wins), 2016 and ‘17 Red Sox (93 wins each), 2013 Tigers (93 wins), 2012 Giants (94 wins).