Imagine how awful the pennant race would be with 7 playoff teams

Pretty awful!

The owners wanted another playoff team in each league.

Remember that? The lockout? Expanded playoffs were one of the big sticking points, and the players eventually got a deal done at 6 playoff teams per league instead of 7. Even that 6 waters it down, but you’ve still got some decent playoff flavor in the soup, so you take what you can get. Sure, the 6th seed team isn’t particularly good — one year we’re gonna get another 2006 Cardinals-tier team winning it all — but they should generally be at least a touch above mediocre, so that’s something.

I’m really stretching here to not hate the current format, and I hope you all appreciate the effort I’m making.

Here are the current states of playoff races: The Mets lead the Braves by 1 game for the NL East and the 2nd seed, which will carry with it a first-round bye. The Padres are up by a game and a half on the Phillies, who are up by a game and a half on the Brewers, and those three teams are fighting for two playoff spots. The Brewers are also technically alive for the NL Central crown, but they're just about eliminated; the same goes for Toronto in the AL East. The Blue Jays lead the AL Wild Card field and are a near lock to make it in; behind them are the Rays and Mariners, separated by a half game, with the Orioles 4 games back of Seattle. Still technically alive but likely to be eliminated within a couple of days are the White Sox, Twins, and, yes, Giants.

I mean, likely to be eliminated unless you believe, like I obviously do, that the Giants will go 9-0 down the stretch, the Phillies will go 1-7, and the Brewers will go 3-6, this securing that 6th spot for Even Year Bullshit. IT COULD HAPPEN.

Ahem.

Setting that aside, though, in the NL we have 5 teams basically set with the 6th having an outside chance of choking enough to let in a straggler, and in the AL we have 4 teams basically set, with the current fifth and sixth seeds just needing to not trip over their own feet on their way to October. It’s really not much of a race. If exactly 5 teams made it, then you’d have a really interesting stretch run, especially in the AL, where only one of the Rays and Mariners could make it in.

It would end up being the Rays, of course, because the Mariners are the Seattle Mariners, but it sure would be fun to fool ourselves into thinking this might be the year they get their shit together.

In the NL, a 5-team field would probably not make a huge difference in drama, because the current gap between the Padres and Phillies is 1.5 games, as is the gap between the Phillies and the Brewers. But the 5-team field would allow for the ULTIMATE CHAOS of a 3-way tie if everything went right, which always allowed for several days of delightful speculation that would be dashed when we get, at best, a couple of two-way ties, instead of one 5-way tie.

But ULTIMATE CHAOS is no more. Because of the new first round starting so soon after the end of the regular season, there are no more tiebreaker games. You had enough games to figure it out, and there’s an extra spot, so if you don’t make it, tough shit. We’re using statistical tiebreakers now. The dream of chaos is dead.

So in that way, the 6-team field is less fun than the 5-team one. But what about the 7-team field?

My friends, it would be boring as hell.

The NL playoff field would be set — again, apologies to the Giants, who will certainly rattle off 9 straight wins to end the regular season and make me look bad. Even that Mets-Braves division race wouldn’t mean a whole lot, since the two teams wouldn’t be pushing for first round byes, but instead seeding, the most boring of all possible discussion topics.

The AL playoff field would be almost set, just like it is now, with the White Sox 3.5 games behind the Orioles for the 7-seed. The White Sox are under .500 right now, by the way. If you’re under .500 on September 27, you shouldn’t make the playoffs. I think that’s a fair rule, and again, apologies to the Giants, whose upcoming miracle run will certainly inspire fans for generations to come.

There would be zero drama. There really wouldn’t be much to play for, other than pride. We’d all just be killing time until the playoffs started, at which point either the Yankees would stomp all over the Orioles like they were the Twins, or the Orioles would pull off a dramatic upset, leading to legions of Yankees fans complaining — not incorrectly — that the Orioles shouldn’t even have really been there in the first place. I mean, I guess that would be fun, but then there would be another round, and then there would be another round, and only after all that would we get to the World Series.

It would all feel so diluted. The playoffs are already a crapshoot, and baseball just keeps making them crappier and shootier. It’s small comfort to think that it could be worse, and yet it also could be worse.

I want people to remember that that’s what the owners wanted and still want, even if they couldn’t get it. They want to sap all the drama out of September to get as many teams as possible playing as many games as possible in October. They want you to look at your crappy 75-78 Giants — WHO WILL DEFINITELY GO ON A RUN STARTING LAST SUNDAY — and find a way to convince yourself they deserve to make the playoffs. They want the playoffs to be a participation trophy for anyone who can finish over .500.

Did that convince any boomers this is bad? I know how boomers hate the participation trophies they created and bought and gave millennials, so I’m hoping that helps.

Making the World Series used to mean that you were the best team in your league. Then, when the Championship Series started, making one of those meant you were the best team in your division. Then, the advent of the Wild Card Era meant we had a thing called “the playoffs” and making those meant that you were almost certainly a very good team. Then we got the second Wild Card, and that watered things down, and now a third Wild Card, creating a whole Wild Card round, and the meaning of making the playoffs is almost lost.

I would like this to stop, and I don’t think it ever will. I worry that the story of baseball is that of a sport destroying itself to become more like the NFL. Well, baseball isn’t the NFL and it shouldn’t be; football is an Event every week, and baseball is part of the fabric of the summer, which builds up to its Event in October.

The more October baseball you get, the less each game means, because game 1 of the Wild Card round honestly isn’t The Game That Will Determine Who’s In The World Series. You won’t get that for a while, so this is just an extra regular season game. It’s not an event yet, and if people stop caring because of an oversaturation of playoff baseball, it never will be. It goes from being baseball’s biggest stage, to, well, meaningless. And I don’t want playoff baseball to be meaningless.

I mean, meaningless except for the 2022 Giants when they TAKE THE WORLD BY STORM over the next 9 games!!!! WHO’S WITH ME?!?!?!