"This is the future of baseball. This is no longer where the game is headed; this is where it is. And it’s worse. It makes the product worse to remove incentives for teams to make themselves better. We’re seeing that in the NL, with a boring playoff race, and in the AL, it’s fun to see a hard charging Tigers team try to seize the last spot from the Twins, but it would be more fun to see division races that go down to the wire between teams that tried desperately to make themselves better because they had to win their divisions to make the playoffs."
I couldn't agree more. It's always surprising to me to hear Giants fans stating that they like the current playoff format better because of 1993 and 2014. To me, I would much rather watch regular season division races and only division winners in the playoffs. Even though I didn't like the outcome, 1993 is still one of my favorite seasons of all time... the last great division race.
I agree… I don’t remember 93 but the pre-wild card division races seem epic. I really liked the 1 wild card model though, to me it’s the best playoff format. You don’t need to win the division, but you only have 1 shot outside of it.
The 5-team format was really fun too because of the winner-take-all wild card game, as you mentioned 2014’s Madbum domination (and 2016 Madbum vs Thor, which was awesome too).
But this now became too diluted, too mediocre and took the excitement and drama away from the playoff race and from winning the division… in the end, I’d say every format before had pros and cons but worked well, much better than the current one.
"Are we supposed to get excited for the Dodgers to throw out bullpen games in the NLDS? "
YES! PLEASE!!
"This is the future of baseball. This is no longer where the game is headed; this is where it is. And it’s worse. It makes the product worse to remove incentives for teams to make themselves better. We’re seeing that in the NL, with a boring playoff race, and in the AL, it’s fun to see a hard charging Tigers team try to seize the last spot from the Twins, but it would be more fun to see division races that go down to the wire between teams that tried desperately to make themselves better because they had to win their divisions to make the playoffs."
I couldn't agree more. It's always surprising to me to hear Giants fans stating that they like the current playoff format better because of 1993 and 2014. To me, I would much rather watch regular season division races and only division winners in the playoffs. Even though I didn't like the outcome, 1993 is still one of my favorite seasons of all time... the last great division race.
I agree… I don’t remember 93 but the pre-wild card division races seem epic. I really liked the 1 wild card model though, to me it’s the best playoff format. You don’t need to win the division, but you only have 1 shot outside of it.
The 5-team format was really fun too because of the winner-take-all wild card game, as you mentioned 2014’s Madbum domination (and 2016 Madbum vs Thor, which was awesome too).
But this now became too diluted, too mediocre and took the excitement and drama away from the playoff race and from winning the division… in the end, I’d say every format before had pros and cons but worked well, much better than the current one.