Let’s be honest: That was fun.
Regardless of what you feel about the 16-team field, or the face that two teams qualified for the postseason with records two games under .500 — the first two sub-.500 playoff teams in MLB history, by the way — you have to admit that Wednesday was pretty thrilling (unless your team lost, of course).
Eight playoff baseball games — four of them elimination contests — starting at noon ET, with first pitches following at hour intervals for the next five hours and two more in the evening. All-day baseball is the best baseball. Appointment baseball. Palate-cleansing baseball.
MORE: Updated MLB playoff TV schedule, scores
At one point, five games were going at the same time — FIVE! — with the Reds and Braves trading scoreless extra innings, before Freddie Freeman finally knocked in the game-winner. The Marlins made their oh-too-precedented late-inning comeback against the Cubs at Wrigley Field. The Twins somehow extended a mind-boggling streak of postseason incompetence — 18 straight playoff losses — and the A’s jumped the ChiSox early to stave off elimination and force a winner-take-all game Thursday. The Rays romped past the Jays to advance and the Cardinals shocked a lot of folks with a win in San Diego. The Dodgers won — OK, that one wasn't too exciting — and the Yankees and Indians produced a playoff slugfest.
Wednesday was the kind of day a baseball fan could get used to. It very much had the feel of the first day of the NCAA Tournament, didn’t it? A new game starting every hour, multiple games — some nail-biters — ending in relative short order. Feels like the type of excitement MLB should strive to replicate every year, right?
Agreed. But not this exact format. Far from it.
A lifelong friend — and baseball fan — who considers himself a baseball traditionalist texted me as the first games were starting Tuesday night: “I couldn’t be less excited for the playoffs. It’s meaningless. Play a season and then pull names from a hat.” By early Wednesday evening after a full slate of games, though, he texted again: “I find myself way way more into this than I anticipated. It kind of feels like the playoffs.”
Did that mean he was walking back his statement from the day before a little bit?
“Not at all. It’s still a joke. Doesn’t mean it’s not exciting to play the lottery.”
Exactly. So how does baseball keep the excitement but lose “joke” element?
Let’s start here: The 2020 regular season and playoffs are not the problem. With all the elements happening in the world in 2020, it’s amazing that we’ve gotten to this point, that baseball is being played. This isn’t to complain about what’s happening now, just to say that, going forward, it needs to be different. Cool?
Now, here’s the biggest problem: The regular season has to matter more. This year, all eight teams play best-of-three series in the opening round. There’s zero benefit for the better seeds, unless you count batting last in a game as an advantage. And, folks, that’s not much of an advantage. On Tuesday, the road team — the lower seed — won three of the four games. On Wednesday, the road team won four of the eight, giving the lower seeds a 7-5 record — and two of the lower seeds (the Yankees and Astros) swept the higher seed.
I went into greater detail in this piece before the playoff started, but MLB has to do something to protect the regular season, so teams actually try. There has to be a difference in October between finishing with the best record and the eighth-best record. For starters, the seeding has to be fixed. And maybe it’s giving the top team(s) a bye in the opening round, a free pass into the LDS.
MORE: Sporting News' MLB playoff predictions
But if we want to keep the all-day NCAA Tournament feel, here’s an idea. Make all eight playoff teams in each league play a three-game opening-round series, with the higher seed hosting everything, but with this twist: The three division winners only have to win one game to advance (the 4 vs. 5 series would remain standard best-of-three). So the Dodgers (the NL’s No. 1 seed) would only have to win one game, while the Brewers (the No. 8 seed) would have to sweep the three-game series. Challenging for the Brewers, sure, but winning a division has to matter. The regular season has to matter. The team that finished over .700 in the regular season deserves a significant first-round advantage over a team that finished two games under .500.
And that would be fun, with every single game in the first round a potential elimination game. Here’s another truth: If MLB does expand to 16 teams on a permanent basis (or even 14) and it becomes pretty darn easy to make the playoffs — every team around .500 would be in the mix pretty much every year — and there’s no real difference between winning a division and barely squeaking into the postseason, do you really think owners are going to spend big money to bring in the quality of players needed to produce great teams? Nah. What this current 2020 playoff format would do, if it’s kept as-is, would be to encourage mediocrity and encourage owners not to spend on players. That’s bad for players, and it’s bad for fans.
But bringing excitement to October, with one or two full-slate days of multiple games, is good. Now it’s up to baseball to figure out how to keep that excitement while getting rid of the shortcomings, if the expanded playoffs are indeed here to stay.
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October 01, 2020 at 10:06PM
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MLB's all-day playoff buffet showed type of excitement possible, but tweaks are needed - Sporting News
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