Stop Whining About Baseball’s Playoff Format

The Braves were dominant in the regular season but not so much in October. Photo: Andy Lewis/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

Major League Baseball just completed its first genuinely successful, scandal-free season in what feels like a lifetime. Yet according to various writers, pundits, and personalities, the sport already has a new crisis on its hands. What would America’s (former) national pastime be without a good panic, after all?

The problem, apparently, is that baseball’s best teams can’t seem to triumph in the playoffs. This year, the teams with the best regular-season records were the 104-win Atlanta Braves, the 101-win Baltimore Orioles, and the 100-win Los Angeles Dodgers. These three teams ended up winning a single postseason game combined before heading home. In recent decades, as the playoffs have expanded, upsets like these have grown much more common.  “Remember when winning a division title in Major League Baseball meant something?” Howie Rose, the Mets’ famed radio announcer, lamented last week.

Baseball is in its second year of a new playoff format, which added a two-out-of-three wild card round. Six teams in each league now get to play in October, with the two best American League and National League teams earning byes into the divisional round. These byes constitute new prizes for teams that amass the best records over baseball’s famously lengthy 162-game season. (They also get home-field advantage in the division series.) Playing in the wild-card round, particularly on the road, is intended to be a punishment for teams who weren’t good enough to skip a round.

And yet the 90-win Texas Rangers, who lost the AL West division in heartbreaking fashion to the Houston Astros, just blitzed through the wild card round (on the road), then crushed the Orioles in the division series, taking two games at Camden Yards in Baltimore. The 84-win Arizona Diamondbacks did the same thing, taking two wild card games on the road and sweeping away another division winner, the Dodgers. The 90-win Philadelphia Phillies, at least, had home field for their wild card series, so it wasn’t a surprise that they made quick work of the Florida Marlins. What happened next, though, was unexpected: they dispatched the Braves, baseball’s 2023 juggernaut, in just four games. Of the remaining teams in World Series contention, only the Houston Astros, who beat the Minnesota Twins to reach their record seven consecutive American League Championship Series, were supposed to be here — at least in the view of baseball’s chattering class. For those traditionalists, the other three teams are practically fraudulent.

As the sportswriter Joe Posnanski has pointed out, baseball is the only professional sport that obsesses so much over whether the teams with the best records reach the championship. NBA and NFL fans revel in playoff upsets. A higher percentage of NBA teams reach the playoffs than in baseball, transforming the regular season into something of a formality, with listless February games leading into a far more entertaining spring. No one bemoans a Cinderella story there or in football, where fans, in a short season, are conditioned for the unusual victories that come with a very small sample size.

Baseball, to a certain fan, has always been different. The six-month season is far longer, and the marathon should reward those who can thrive in May, July, and September alike. Winning 100 games is incredibly hard to do. For the first seven decades of MLB’s existence, the best teams always met in the World Series. The romance of the pennant chase was born then, with the victors in the two eight-team leagues facing off in a single championship, almost always a best of seven. Just getting there was a generation-defining achievement, with World Series losers like the 1959 Chicago White Sox and 1967 Boston Red Sox (the Impossible Dream!) enrapturing fans for decades to come. Never mind that the seasons were mostly a waste for the many middling or outright moribund franchises, like the Washington Senators and the St. Louis Browns, who rarely got close to the pennant. There are still baseball lifers who think this is how the game should be.

But since 1969, short series have increasingly defined championship baseball. MLB rightly blew up the old system when it added a best-of-five championship series between the winners of two divisions, the east and west, in each league. The ALCS and NLCS expanded to seven games in 1985 and the divisional series was born a decade later, when wild cards were created in each league to allow teams that finished second in a division to get to the playoffs. Two divisions, in the AL and NL, grew to three. In the 2010s, the wild cards were expanded further, with the two best second-place teams playing a single elimination game. Like many fans, I was annoyed that a team’s season could boil down to a single game, and MLB apparently agreed. Hence the current system, and even more playoff teams.

So has the regular season been cheapened? Maybe. Is this bad for baseball? Not really. It’s not as if one seven-game series, in baseball, is enough to decide whether one team is truly superior to the other. The mark of greatness has long been whether you can translate regular-season success into postseason glory. The 1990s Yankees, the idols of my childhood, were a dynasty not because they won in the regular season (they always did) but because they figured out how to best inferior teams in the playoffs. Like clockwork, they’d sweep the Rangers in the ALDS or beat back the Mariners, who managed more wins in 2001 but were plainly, in terms of roster construction, less impressive. It was understood most teams could not do this — winning in the playoffs is very hard — and that is why the Yankees are remembered as baseball’s last true dynasty.

The current Astros, who are creeping into Yankees territory, aren’t perturbed by evolving playoff formats, either. They cheated during their first championship run, in 2017, but they’ve proven, through savvy acquisitions and stellar player development, they are the best franchise in the sport. Their hitters — by contemporary standards — rarely strike out, and their starting pitching is perpetually above average, which is always an asset come October. Sabermetricians have long determined it is impossible to quantify clutch performance, but mental toughness clearly matters, and the Astros are leagues ahead of everyone else, particularly the Braves, who managed to whine for days on end about a journalist recording a player’s postgame boasts in the clubhouse.

Baseball pundits should also keep in mind that regular-season records can be deceptive. The Rangers and Astros won 11 fewer games than the Orioles, but they are stocked with far more individual talent. The Rangers, in particular, were brutally unlucky, going 14-22 in one-run games and suffering, for months on end, with poor performances out of their bullpen. These days, their relief pitching has been competent and the rest of their squad — stacked with the best shortstop and second baseman in baseball, a tremendous outfield, strong enough starting pitching — appears as good as any that has won a title in the last few years.

The same is true of the Phillies, who roared from the wild-card round to the World Series a year ago and might pull off the same trick again. The Braves, who hit as many home runs in one season as any team in baseball history, were more talented overall. But the Phillies have one of the very best starting pitchers in the game, an elite shortstop and catcher, and a superstar in Bryce Harper who is headed, barring injury, to the Hall of Fame. Even the Diamondbacks’ upset of the Dodgers seems inevitable in retrospect. Injuries and a domestic-violence suspension wiped out their starting pitching, leaving them with an ailing Clayton Kershaw and a 36-year-old Lance Lynn, one of the worst pitchers in the league this year, to start two of the three divisional games. The Diamondbacks, equipped with a pair of excellent starters and a young core that includes Corbin Carroll, the best rookie in the league, suddenly look much better than their 84 wins.

Given all of this, MLB would be wise to ignore its critics. The playoff format is logical. Further tweaks, like reordering divisions or handing out postseason berths to teams purely on where they finish in the standings, might happen in the coming years. (Getting in automatically because you won your deplorable division doesn’t make much sense anymore.) It might also help to shorten the season, either to the 154 games that were played before 1961 or even fewer, to allow for longer playoffs — though owners would be loath to sacrifice such gate revenue.

Beyond a bye, though, it’s not clear what other advantages supposed titans like the Braves and Orioles should accrue. Two byes? Sure, they’d be playing each other in the World Series in 1968, but this isn’t 1968. Baseball is about winning when it matters. Let Braves fans, with their fragile psyches and casual racism, mull that over until next April.