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

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(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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