16 teams in the playoffs? What a country!
The country is America, but also MLB. It's not my best metaphor.
When you’ve been watching sports for a while, there’s this hidden layer of meaning that you intuitively understand. It sits below the game, a load-bearing wall so that you can understand why what you’re watching matters. This rookie went 0-for-4 but hit the ball hard three times, while that veteran had a couple bloop singles. You know who did his job well and who got lucky; you know whose future you’d bet on if you had to, or wanted to, or were a gambling addict.
There’s a macro level to that too. Maybe 25 years ago you were looking at ERA instead of wins, but now you’re looking at FIP or xFIP or the Statcast leaderboards instead of FIP. You see a team’s record, then look at their Pythagorean record to see how they’ve really been doing. If you want to go deeper into it, you look at their cluster luck and third order winning percentage to see how much of the Pythag is an illusion. You can go farther than that if you want to, or you can stay there, or you can stop a few steps short of that. Your call, but no matter what you choose, you understand the basic something about the game at a basic level.
This goes for the playoffs too. The reason baseball’s playoffs are special is that most teams don’t get there. The reason it’s an accomplishment is that most teams don’t get there. The reason the quality of the games is higher is (cues the audience) MOST TEAMS DON’T GET THERE.
That was great, everyone. Give yourselves a hand.
The thing that is unique and wonderful about baseball’s regular season is that it is long. It’s a grind. The thing that is unique and wonderful about baseball’s postseason is that to get there, you have to survive a long grind of a season and come out the other side gasping for breath and a lot of games over .500. It’s really, really hard to make the playoffs without being a significantly above average team.
What Rob Manfred wants is to make it easier to make the playoffs without being a significantly above average team.
I understand that impetus for 2020, where everything’s made up and the points don’t matter (and, more to the point, the increased variance in such a low number of games makes it very hard to gauge any team’s true talent level, other than the Padres, who are the greatest baseball team in history), but now that Manfred is talking about the format sticking around post-Apocalypse Year, well, let’s talk back to him about it.
The biggest problem I have with this proposal is that it sucks and I hate it and it’s stupid.
The second biggest problem I have with it is that it destroys the thing that makes baseball’s playoffs special. Most teams don’t get there. It’s incredibly hard to get there. If you do make it, then regardless of what you do in the playoffs, you have achieved something special which your fans will remember for years to come.
If the playoffs permanently expand, then that’s gone. What you’ll have is this other thing, this thing that the NBA has and the NHL has, where half the league makes it and so just making it isn’t an accomplishment anymore. It changes the meaning of the playoffs from that old meaning to this new meaning in a way that the league will absolutely never acknowledge.
The work of creating this meaning has been done for a couple generations now, since the first wild card year in 1995. And that was a change too; ‘95 was the first non-strike year to have more than four playoff teams in MLB. But that was driven by expansion, as was the playoff expansion in 1969: there were more teams, so it made sense that there would be more playoff spots. There’s a logic to that, MLB did its best with it. People just like me complained and lost, and it was fine.
But baseball did lose something in each round of playoff expansion. I think the trade-offs were worth it — maybe not when they added the second wild card team, though I’ve always just considered that a play-in game that isn’t The Real Playoffs, which solves all my problems — but they existed all the same. Before the ALCS and NLCS started in 1969, they didn’t call it “the postseason.” They called it “the World Series,” because the regular season ended, and then two teams played the World Series and then baseball was over for the year.
Creating a shiny new category of “postseason” in baseball turned purists off, and it hurt the best team in the league, who now had to play an inferior team just to get to the World Series, but there was still meaning in winning your division. When they expanded the playoffs to add a wild-card team, that was a blow because now this non-winner got the same reward as actual winners, but it was still incredibly hard to get to the playoffs. This was the design, and it’s one that people came to cherish.
Baseball doesn’t want that design to stick around, though. They see NBA owners sailing out to see on yachts stuffed with hundred dollars bills, and they want a piece of that. They’ll alienate old fans who don’t want to see this watered down postseason, and they won’t bring in new ones, who are too busy playing Fortnite to really care about baseball, which isn’t one of the cooler professional sports anyway. It’s a lose-lose proposition if you really think about it.
To the owners, then, the key is not to think about it. To them, it doesn’t matter that the meaning of baseball’s playoffs is inextricably tied to those playoffs being exclusionary. The playoffs will still carry that meaning for another year or two while those owners cash their checks, and the real carpetbaggers will turn around and sell their teams before the value craters. Meanwhile, those of us who love baseball and just want to watch the thing that we love will have to settle for another mild bastardization, another watering down.
Expanded playoffs are coming. Maybe we’ll get extremely lucky and it’ll be an NFL-style 12-team postseason. Maybe Rob Manfred will just do whatever he wants and dare the Players Union to stop him. Either way, it’s change that will line pocketbooks today at the expense of tomorrow. Just like everything else in baseball. Just like everything else in America.