Honor the Division Winners

How Long Until Bud Selig's Replacement is Asking for More Playoff Games?

 

With Bud Selig announcing his retirement and baseball season coming to the end of its season, the discussion of the wild card’s place in baseball has to be discussed. When Bud Selig took over as commissioner in 1992, baseball had 4 playoff teams total. Now as he is retiring after being the commissioner for over 20 years, each league will have five-team playoff.

While I have no issue with the baseball’s move to the three divisions per league and one wildcard, baseball’s continuous growth past that in the playoffs is where I have the issue. Right now baseball has created one-game playoff for two teams to play in to get the wildcard. As much fun as do or die is, its only time until baseball sees the extra money in expanding this wildcard game to a round where the teams play and best of three. This is where enough is enough. As unpredictable as the one game maybe as seen by the Cardinals upsetting of the Braves in 2012 despite being 6 games worse than them in the regular season, baseball needs to put honoring regular season excellence over the increased revenues.

Baseball is a game of flow. For most teams the two or three days off between the end of the regular season and start of the post season is just the second time all season with multiple days off with the all-star game in July. While there would be financial benefits from adding playoff games, it may come at the expense of the teams that won their division. Currently the fourth game of the post season (Game 3 of NLDS and ALDS), which would become game one of the Division Series with an expanded wildcard round, is supposed to be played a week after the regular season ends, this type of long interruption could hurt teams that earned the bye by winning their division.

The NFL, which is the only other sport that has a post-season bye, has seen mixed results for teams that acquire the bye. Since the NFL went to its current post-season format in 1990, 34 of the 46 Super Bowl participants have had the bye week and they have won 15 of the 23 Super Bowls. Those numbers roughly equate to 2/3rd of both Super Bowl participants and winners which is better than the 50% of the remaining post season teams they represent in the second round. Of the 8 teams to win Super Bowls without the bye 5 of them happened in the last 6 years. Recently it seems like not having to have the bye week in the NFL is an advantage.

Often that teams have the bye in the NFL are sitting their starters by week 17 and then find themselves in the post season playing their first meaningful game in over 3 weeks and struggle to play as well. If baseball were to adopt the extra playoff games, would the same thing happen? Would hot hitters cool off without real games in over a week? Does giving a pitcher a 7th or 8th day of rest really help? Last October the Tigers had 6 days off between the ALCS and World Series and got swept. In 2010 the Phillies had the best record in baseball, but after sweeping the NLDS waited almost a week for the NLCS and then lost to a team they were 5 games better than in the regular season.

I know some of the time off in  post season is inevitable, but hopefully Major League Baseball doesn't unnecessarily add additional breaks for the best teams . The MLB needs to understand while the extra wild card game creates increased drama (2013 ended with a chaotic play-in game just to get the wild card round), winning the division should be the biggest advantage for the post season. The MLB might see the extra money from the increased ticket sales of two sold out playoff games and even more games to sell to a network, but the MLB needs to leave the money on the table. Honor the regular season and winning the division winners and keep the wildcard just one game.