Fall Classic with more Class

By Joe Schackman


Did Major League Baseball just make a logical and well thought out decision?

Baseball is notorious for their sloth-like approach to change (technology to accurately call balls and strikes you say? But what about the human element!). Rarely does anything happen quickly in baseball and rarely does it happen with any type of logic. Which is what makes the MLB’s most recent announcement about adding two playoff spots so startling. It happened in just a few months and it actually makes sense.

From baseball's inception to 1968, it had just about the simplest playoff format in major pro sports. Two divisions of 10 teams. Best team from each division goes to World Series. Winner is champion. No best-of-five series, no rounds and no byes. 

But for the 1969 season, the MLB made its first tweak to the format. With the addition of four teams to the professional ranks, they broke the NL and AL into two divisions and started the championship series. Againa, a pretty simple format. Win your division, win the league championship, win the World Series.

But baseball continued to tinker, and in 1994, they revamped the format again, adding the wild card. This is when the purists hit the roof. Now it was possible to not even be the best team in your division but still be the World Series champion.The new format had its pluses. Fans could see their local teams in the playoffs more often. Most importantly though was that more playoff teams meant more revenue via TV contracts and ticket revenue. 

But over the years, the drawbacks emerged. Most notably, there was very little incentive to winning the division or gunning for the best record in the MLB. Since there were no byes or anything of the sort, if the two best teams in the league were in the same division (See Yankees-Rays or Yankees-Sox), then they had no reason to push for the division crown. They could ease off the gas, rest their starters and just play un-entertaining baseball. Fans lost out on seeing the two of the best teams in the league slug it out for an entire month. A critical month at that. When September rolls around, the NFL and NCAA football start their season and steal all of the momentum baseball has been building during the summer months.

So the MLB has decided to fix it, with an unorthodox system that may actually work without morphing into the NBA.

They will add another wild card berth to each league and in the first “round” of the playoffs, those two teams from each league will play each other in a one-game play-in. You win that game and you move on. Lose and you go home. Its brilliance lies in its simplicity. 

You know coming down the stretch that no team wants to end up in that situation, because anything can happen on any given night. It also opens up a whole slew of managerial questions. Do you use your ace pitcher if he is on short rest for the play-in game? When do you use him again if you win? Imagine if you are Joe Girardi and you have to determine the best way to deploy CC Sabathia. Endless debates and possibilities. 

Most importantly though, it makes being a division champion very important. You can avoid the luck and randomness of one game by pushing through those last few weeks and going for the win.

For the baseball purists who yearn for those classic pennant races, this won’t appease them one bit. No way more playoff teams could do that. But it fixes the system that we have. No matter how much history and tradition is tied into a pennant race, there is no way that Major League Baseball is going to go backwards and take less revenue. But now they have a new system in place to enhance the last month of the season and take on the juggernaut that is the NFL. This system can only help the game.

Joe Schackman is a co-founder and editor at Began in '96