The 2022 Dodgers were a great baseball team.
Man, they were good. They were so fucking good. They were already so fucking good last year, and then they added Freddie Freeman to become ridiculously fucking good. They outscored their opponents by 334 runs, the best run differential since the 1939 Yankees. They had the best offense in baseball by a mile. They had the second best pitching in baseball. They were sixth in defense. They did everything brilliantly.
Then they lost. I’ll take a moment for you, the Giants fan, to add a hearty LOL to the cacophony of hearty LOLs from Giants fans everywhere.
Okay, great. Good work.
The 2022 Dodgers lost in the Division Series, and immediately it caused shock and recrimination among baseball analysts. How could this happen, they asked. Was it the new playoff format? Did they have too much time off? Should they have gotten some extra advantage? How can we make sure this kind of thing never happens again?
You see, it was wrong that the Dodgers lost the first series they played. It wasn’t how things are supposed to work, and that means it’s a problem. If we have a problem, then we should try to solve that problem. Simple math.
The Dodgers, we are meant to understand, are too good to lose like they’re some lowly band of peasants. They are feudal lords, high above the lowly serfs who dare to challenge them, and when they deign to play their lessers in a series of baseball contests, those plebeians have the gall to win? Unacceptable! We must go to a magistrate posthaste!
The proper attitude to have, we are meant to understand, is this: We want good-but-not-great teams in the playoffs, but we don’t want them to win in the playoffs. Yes, the Padres are allowed to trade for Juan Soto and reach October, but then their role is to be subsumed by the unstoppable power of the juggernaut a little to the north. The Phillies can win an almost dramatic race for the 6th and final playoff spot in the NL, but once they do that, they have no business beating the mighty Braves. It’s just not their place.
I should note here that this attitude doesn’t even come from the Dodgers. As much as I hate to begrudgingly give them even the tiniest amount of non-criticism, the Dodgers know how this shit works. I mean, they’ve lost enough times in October that they’d better. They can lose. Anyone can lose. The reason the playoffs are meaningful is that being a better team doesn’t guarantee you anything other than playing a couple of games at home. They wouldn’t be worth watching if you knew who was going to win.
But this isn’t good enough for the Busters Olney of the world, the Mollys Knight, even the Joes Scarborough. There has to be a tweak to the schedule, a way to make it more fair, more in line with regular season results. I mean, yes, there is: Don’t have a Division Series. Two divisions, two division winners, they play each other for who gets to go to the World Series. The more the playoffs expand, the more likely it is that a not-that-great team will win, because there will be more not-that-great teams to go around.
But then you don’t get as many playoff games, and Major League Baseball doesn’t get as much money. Now, I’ve been very clear that I’m fine with fewer playoff teams because the more there are, the more the regular season gets cheapened. But this is the playoff format now, and the Dodgers have to beat the team that’s in front of them.
Last year, the Giants had to beat the team that was in front of them, and they didn’t, and I didn’t quibble with the playoff format because the answer wasn’t to change the format. The answer was the beat their opponent, or maybe for a certain umpire to know what a check swing is, not that I’m still bitter about that.
The purpose of playoffs is not to crown the best regular season team. The purpose of playoffs is to have a dramatic tournament so at the end you can say, “These guys! These guys are the winners!” and no one can say that they’re not. If you are going to have playoffs — and it’s safe to say that MLB will have playoffs going forward — then everyone involved has to be able to win, or else the whole thing is a farce.
The Dodgers could have won this year. They won the first game, they were tied going into the sixth in the second, they only gave up two runs in the third, and they had a seventh inning lead in the fourth game. Any one of those games could have gone the other way. It’s not the format’s fault that Josh Hader rediscovered how to be good, or that Robert Suarez is apparently the best pitcher on Earth. The Dodgers’ best offensive game was right after that 5-day layoff that supposedly ruined everything. They were fine. The Padres just won.
As much as you’ll hear complaints and kvetching about that, the fact is: that’s baseball. The objectively better team does not win 100% of the time. I mean, the Dodgers lost their first two series of the year to the Rockies, who were terrible. They got swept once by the Giants, who were certainly much worse than the Dodgers this year. They went just 1-5 against the Pirates. I assure you, none of that had to do with the playoff format.
I see people demanding MLB change the playoffs so it’s harder for the best teams to lose and I see a bunch of losers. Not the Dodgers (well, yes, also the Dodgers, but not in the specific way I mean here), but the people so desperate to remove themselves from the unpredictability and randomness of baseball that they’ll kneel down to kiss the feet of some guy, just because they think he should be a king.
The Padres earned the series victory. The Dodgers didn’t. The reason winning a World Series is an accomplishment is that it’s really, really hard to make it through several playoff rounds and win each one. It’s deeply silly to say that’s a flaw. That’s the purpose. That’s the point. That’s what makes it fun. Take that away, and what’s the point?
Quelle dommage indeed. You laid out the situation perfectly - if MLB wants more teams involved in the playoffs, then the potential for more unexpected outcomes increases. C’est la guerre. Bonne chance!
You captured the "problem". The owners want more postseason teams because they makes them more money, but people don't like to see less than the best in the championship, so they would at least nominally like fewer teams playing for a championship. I'm probably some un-American hippy for saying this, but the solution is non-championship postseason tournaments. For the same reason I still watch non-championship bowl games and the NIT, I'd enjoy this solution to the "problem". It makes the owners money; I know I would be been glued to my TV and even buy a T-shirt watching the Giants take on the ChiSox in a 7-game Sandlot Series. And, non-championship tournaments don't allow mediocre/meh teams to go on some run that weakens the meaning of the regular season; the Giants lost their opportunity to play for a championship by being terrible at times in the regular season, but yeah, I would still be good with a "Giants Win the Sandlot 2022" T-shirt!