MLB postseason: A sensible way to un-saturate the playoffs

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(Photo by Cooper Neill/MLB Photos via Getty Images) /

Too many thrills watching the fight for… second place? Too many MLB postseason games? Here’s a sensible re-alignment suggestion.

Over 23 million people watched Game Seven of the 2019 World Series, perhaps heartened by the surreal resilience of the Washington Nationals against the burdens of their city’s baseball history and the Houston Astros alike. (That was then: “Washington—First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.” This is now: “Washington—First in war, first in peace, and first in Show.)

Like the Nats’ host city does almost by nature, the Astros are now seen as a compromised giant. But Game Seven’s impressive-looking television viewership merely softened the blow of it having been the least-viewed Game Seven on record. Which gives me a pleasant excuse to argue once again on behalf of something I’ve argued before: the pennant races and the MLB postseason alike are bedeviled by a blend of dilution and saturation.

Dilution because the races are compromised. Saturation because there are too many more games than absolutely necessary to determine World Series combatants, and because the World Series itself has had its primacy undermined.

For long enough baseball’s government has gazed upon other sports leagues and decided, well, those leagues are surging in popularity so it’s obvious that baseball’s in big trouble—let’s fix what’s not broken, instead of worrying about what might be broken.

During the 1990s, so help me God you could have sworn baseball’s attitude taking that direction and others amounted to, Baseball sucks. Bring the wife and kids! So, on behalf of baseball not sucking anymore, the Lords of Baseball decided, well, the NFL and the NBA and even the NHL are doing boffo business with those protracted postseasons of theirs, so we’d better get in on it before we lose the plot entirely.

Except that baseball lost the plots going that way. The plot of the good, long, summer season, and championship plot, that is. From the moment baseball decided it needed wild cards rather than sensible divisional re-alignment, as often as not and more often than healthy we’ve been living all the thrills and chills of sitting on the edges of our seats waiting to see who’d end up . . . in second place, and with the best shot at a wild card postseason entry.

The good news is that even baseball’s shortsighted lordships haven’t sent the game toward the truly ridiculous extremes of basketball and hockey postseasons. Last year, sixteen teams each in the thirty-team NBA and thirty-one team NHL opened the playoffs. Ten of thirty baseball teams including the wild card teams open a postseason. It’s still far too much, and the MLB postseason itself is still too saturating.

(Photo by Jonathan Newton /The Washington Post via Getty Images) /

A sensible way to un-saturate the MLB postseason

As wonderful as it was to watch the Nats plow through last year’s MLB postseason all the way to the Promised Land, and with a few hair-raisers along the way to augment their achievement, it’s also true that they got in in the first place by winning the first of two National League wild cards for having the best record among second-place finishers. The 2019 Nats went from baseball’s low (19-31 when they went to sleep May 23) to baseball’s best the rest of the way.

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But imagine how much better their 74-38 the rest of the way would have been if they had no incentive but the division title for which to play?

Since MLB seems disinclined to think about it for the moment, allow me the license of audacity to think for it. Eliminate the wild cards, once and for all. We don’t need to experience the aforementioned second-place thrills and chills, we need to re-experience real championship competition again.

This is not childhood, in which the sometimes harsh but usually enlightening lessons of human nature’s competitiveness are neutralized in favor of feeling good. (I speak from experience: once, in the third grade, I was denied a prize I’d earned for winning my tenth consecutive spelling contest because—so help me, this is what my teacher said, decades ahead of her time—it was “unfair” that I happened to win them fair and square, and it was someone else’s “turn.”) Major league baseball is played by young and not-so-young men who are well enough past the time when they need feel-good prizes equal to someone else’s earning just to remove the transient sting of loss. It needs to reward proper achievement properly.

So imagine that the division winner with the best regular-season record among each league’s trio of leaders should get a division-series bye while the other two division leaders each get to slug it out in a best-of-three. Bank on it. It would be a lot more thrilling for fans in the ballparks and in front of their television sets or radios or computers, and a lot more incentive-drenched for the contestants.

Then, imagine the winners of those best-of-three division series meeting the division bye winners in a League Championship Series . . . returned to the LCS’s original best-of-five format. You’ve done a lot more than just remove a championship disincentive, you just might have sent the saturation factor clean over the center-field fence.

The World Series, thus remaining its best-of-seven format, would see its position as baseball’s Promised Land restored to its proper primacy and respect. Not to mention that we wouldn’t be anywhere near close to the prospective specter of the World Series extending into November. (So that would deny someone else earning Hall of Famer Derek Jeter‘s secondary nickname, Mr. November? Big deal.)

We’d have real live regular-season races again as well. Never mind about the teams who may run away with it now and then. A wise man once said our Davids are not Davids without their Goliaths to slay. Baseball delivers abundant thrills and provokes abundant chills, and few of them are as thrilling and chilling as watching one of its Davids bring one of its Goliaths crashing to earth. Last year’s Nats, powerhouse though they proved after May 23, were such a David slaying (and outsmarting) the Houston Goliath. No wonder Game Seven had more viewers than Florida has a population.

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By the way, the same MLB postseason re-alignment just might have a shot at dissipating the tanking mentality among several teams, too. At least until baseball’s government wises up and slaps the tankers with sanctions appropriate enough to send the same message my suggested postseason re-alignment should send: The common good of the game isn’t the same thing as making or hoarding money for it.

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