The wild card playoff idea, again
Another year, another attempt to trot out the wild card playoff idea. I put this in Sox Therapy because that’s where I have keys, but the idea really is worth general discussion, IMO:
Each league has two wild-card teams.
The wild card teams play a one-game playoff, with the team with the better record hosting.
The playoffs then proceed as they currently do.
Why?
1. One-game playoffs are awesome.
2. Division races become more significant, because the division winner avoids the huge risk of a one-game playoff.
3. The team that wins the wild card enters the full playoffs at more of a disadvantage, having had to get through the one-game playoff first (less rest; more pitcher usage).
What difference would it make right now?
1. In the AL, the battle for the AL East would be a significant battle. The runner-up would not get an automatic spot, but would instead host a one-game playoff. (I, for one—as a Red Sox fan having difficulty caring whether we win the division—would immediately start caring.) The Tigers and Mariners would still be in a significant battle for the second AL wild-card spot.
2. In the NL, where the Padres and Phillies are currently duking it out (along with others) without playing each other, we’d be guaranteed to have them settle it on the field.
One downside: If both wild card teams are from the same division, you could potentially have a third-place team win the World Series. One way to avoid that would be to rule that the two wild card teams must come from different divisions (i.e., the two best second-place teams). This would mean that, for example, if the top 3 NL wild card teams were Padres-Rockies-Phillies, the Rockies would drop out, and the Padres would host the Phillies.
Toby
Posted: September 24, 2007 at 12:40 PM |
42 comment(s)
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Given that we're not going to go back to only 4, I think the best idea is to either
a) leave as is, or
b) give the wild card only 1 home game i nthe 5-gamne set, or
c) make the wild card vs best-record matchup be a best-of-6 (a best-of-7 where the other team is spotted one win). WC has to win 4, best record only has to win 3. And allow the WC to play the division winner.
The Wild Card is a kludge but most attempts I've seen to "remedy" it turn out to be even worse kludges; the 8 division idea looks good until a sub .500 team gets in over a .600 level 2nd place team from another division.
Either dump the WC and go back to two divisions per league, or add two teams and go with 8 4-team divisions and no WC, I don't care which.
I wouldn't want that kind of responsibility if I had the best record in the league. If you pick a team, that lets the world know that you think you will beat them in a short series. And if you lose, it's all the worse.
Isn't Toby's idea pretty much the same as Bob Costas' proposal in his book years ago?
But here's a thread from May 2002 where I floated the idea (it wasn't the first time).
Break into four leagues:
1 use DH, present conditions
2 use DH, 1960's-era conditions (no hitter's backdrop, higher mound, etc.)
3 no DH, present conditions
4 no DH, 1960's-era conditions
First round of playoffs: Top two teams in each league play each other, with top team getting spotted 1 game for every 2-game advantage in the standings. (e.g. if up by 4 games, top team only needs to win 2 games, while runner-up needs to win 4.) Any team with an 8-game lead gets a first round bye, while the runner-up goes home.
Second round: Leagues 1+2 square off against each other, as do leagues 3+4.
World Series: The two winners of the second round advance. Game 7, if necessary, is played at a neutral site, almost eliminating home-field advantage.
I've come to enjoy the World Series being a battle between two different styles of play, and two rosters built around their particular style of play. If there are going to be divisions, I'd rather that they be split on that premise. I picked the 60's-era pitcher friendly conditions because it's in the historical record; I could just as easily have picked aluminum bats, or 7-inning games, or midgets, or whatever, but then we lose the connection with history.
I think the only thing that needs to be looked into is when the team with the best record should play the team from it's division (wild card with the poorest record of playoff teams). Everything else seems ok to me. I mean in a vacuum you can say that you should reward teams for winning their division and penalize those for not, but come on: divisions are not made equal. If the D-Rays can't elect to change divisions, they shouldn't be penalized with a 1 game playoff because they have the second best record in the league to the BJs. I mean, do you think that some NL West teams wouldn't want to go to the central? Seems like penalizing for geography (and in some cases subjective divisional choices made by baseball: Chicago central but Texas west).
2 use DH, 1960's-era conditions (no hitter's backdrop, higher mound, etc.)
3 no DH, present conditions
4 no DH, 1960's-era conditions
Every decent free agent pitcher will want to go to a team in league 4. Every decent free agent hitter will want to go to league 1 or 3. GMs of leagues 2 and 4 will seek to improve their defenses. In a few years, this won't be a clever study in contrasting styles any more. It will be one league of 14 inning double shutouts and another league of five hour nine inning games with an average offense scoring 850 runs.
That has an attractive symmetry to it, but I think DiFool is correct: it means, inevitably, a sub-.500 team going deep in the playoffs, even winning the Series.
I'd tweak a 32-team alignment to consist of four eight-team divisions: the first-place team from each plays a second-place team from another in the first playoff round of three. With sufficiently imbalanced schedules, the top two teams in each division would always have winning records.
In fact that, or a similar 32-team arrangement, would be near-perfect. The problem with this stupid 30-team six-division alignment is that it's just clumsy and leads to goofy multiple-team "races" that are really hard to follow and rarely involve head-to-head matchups. Whereas an 8-team division can play entirely intraleague for the whole month of September, and there are bound to be good 2- 3- or even 4-team races for a playoff spot or two pretty often, with the contenders going head-to-head at times ...
Taking away the hitter's backdrop would be a serious safety issue...
My solution? Eliminate the wild card.
Or at least go to 8 4-team divisions. As for the worry about sub-.500 teams getting into the playoffs under 8/4, that can happen under the current system, and in any event division races will be preserved with 8/4 instead of perverted.
It's not like you're guaranteed to have no sub-.500 teams once you expand to 10 teams.
You haven't been here long, have you? Many of the regular posters here "came around" to those ideas before this site even existed (when they were regulars at alt-rec-baseball, for instance). Some of us even came around to those ideas before the wild card was introduced to MLB.
As for the worry about sub-.500 teams getting into the playoffs under 8/4, that can happen under the current system, and in any event division races will be preserved with 8/4 instead of perverted.
Yes, it's possible under the current system. But it's a lot more likely with an 8/4 setup because it will be very difficult to imbalance the schedule enough to sufficiently increase the chances that the winner of even a pitiably weak division will have a .500+ record.
Why do you hate America?
Thanks for the history lesson, but I was a regular at rec.sport.baseball (not "alt") starting in 1992.
I was speaking mainly of people in the general media who supposedly love the wild card. For example, I happened to catch a Joe Torre interview last week during which Mike Francesa and Chris Russo were pimping the extra-two-wildcards idea. Torre expressed concern that we don't go to "an NBA or NFL type of format."
That's what I thought. But this is a post by a primate, not a link to an MSM piece. So your rant seemed a bit misplaced.
c) make the wild card vs best-record matchup be a best-of-6 (a best-of-7 where the other team is spotted one win). WC has to win 4, best record only has to win 3.
Sounds good, but what happens if the teams split 3 and 3? Every single mediot and commentator will be screaming for a seventh game to settle it on the field. And they'd probably be right.
I liked the old two-division format, and never quite understood what was wrong with it.
It failed to exploit potential ticket and TV revenue, of course. Fatal flaw for any modern sports scheme.
Torre expressed concern that we don't go to "an NBA or NFL type of format."
Of course. The Yankees have nothing to gain from adding playoff rounds, and everything to lose by playing an extra short series or two.
Couldn't agree more. This fetish with multiple divisions, leagues etc is just plain silly. 2 leagues, NL, AL, top 2 or 4 in each league are in the playoffs. 1 plays 4, 2 plays 3, etc. Couldn't be easier.
I think some of the fear of 8-team or larger divisions comes from the notion that was expressed in 1968: "You can't sell a 12th-place ballclub." The implication was that you could sell the Expos as a sixth-place ballclub, as if people in Montreal weren't very bright. "Hein, they are only 11 games out of fifth place, pas si mauvais, n'est-ce pas ...?"
Texas Ranger fans have become familiar with what it means to be a fourth-place club in a four-team division. It ain't pretty.
Fair call on that from an owners standpoint. However (2) 15 team leagues with the top 2 or 4 making the playoffs is far and away the tidiest system. Surely its also easier from a scheduling standpoint as you can just play everyone in your league the same amount of times. It must be because I've been living overseas for so long that one just gets accustomed to these 25 or more team leagues, then the top 4 just playoff in the finals...
2. No DH.
3. No divisions.
4. Balanced schedule.
5. No interleague.
6. Top 4 teams from each league make playoffs.
7. Three rounds of seven games.
Not really. Costas was against the wild card altogether. His proposal was that the "pennant winner" (i.e. the division winner with the best record) get a first round bye while the other two division winners play each other for the right to play the pennant winner in the LCS.
Obvious disadvantage: The second best team in the league could miss the playoffs while a mediocre winner of a weak division gets in.
Obvious advantage: Not only would you have the potential for an old-fashioned pennant race (with slightly lesser stakes), but all the division races would now mean something. This year's ALE would be a potential replay of 1978.
On balance I like the current setup best, especially with the AL's imbalanced schedule that gives us 19 Yankees-Red Sox games and reduces the number of road trips of eastern teams to the western time zones and vice versa. You're always going to have tradeoffs, but baseball is never going to return to any system that has the potential of making September a moot point for all but two or three teams. My only real worry is that they'll make some excuse to bring in a second wild card and drag this whole thing into November.
Of course, you would have to play interleague games all year long with this setup. Either that, or have one team in each league off every day (and that would mean three or four days off in a row -- three or four extra all-star breaks for your favorite team each year).
they have use their hats to catch flyballs
I thought there was actually a rule against that.
you could switch which guy between innings
You're going soft. The Darren I know would insist that the same guy carry the anvil for all nine innings. Unless the game went into extras. Then they'd get a second anvil.
Could the second one at least be a movie stunt anvil? Like the kind that falls on Curly's head?
Imagine the top two east teams win 103 games. The other two division winners win 92 and 89, and the other WC teams wins 86. And the 86 win team is a 62-72 team without their ace on the mound, who happens to be rested and ready for the WC playoff. Which of the 103 win teams gets that booby prize?
If you did away with the prohibition on two teams in the same division playing one another, I'd be all for a set up where the wild card team got NO home games unless it advanced to the LCS. Yes, the wild card may have a better record than the other two division winners but, still, they didn't win their division. Make 'em pay. If they win the LDS, then they've won something and they get a reward. This would punish, severely without making it impossible for them to win, the wild card team and reward, greatly without assuring victory, the team with the best record. That would also make the Boston/NYY race currently ongoing a helluva lot more interesting, wouldn't it?
Don't free agents go where the money is? And if good hitting is a rare commodity in leagues 2 and 4 won't hitter salaries rise in those leagues in order to attract them? Not that I'm trying to argue for higher salaries... I'm just saying each league would have a different optimal allocation of salary, and that would mitigate the effect you describe.
Also, I'm picking an arbitrary difference to break the current two leagues into four. Pick something else that works for you. Allow only one pitching change per inning. Eliminate the balk rules for faking throws to a base. Use some, but not all, of the 1960's-era conditions. Whatever. (I'd thought a separation based on grass vs. artificial turf would be worthwhile, but most of the artificial turf in MLB has been replaced.)
And of course, once you win, you get the 3 in the ALCS.
Allow only one pitching change per inning.
I like the Bill James rules. You get one freebie mid-inning pitcher change, and that's it. You can't change pitchers mid-inning unless that pitcher gives up a run.
Rocky: Not again?!
Moose: This time fer shure!
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