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I think the structure is a function of 2010 and many other years where teams have done this. I'm sure they want the expanded playoffs (is that official yet?) but I think the situation being what it is is what drove the format.
By the way, this is insane. As much as I don't want the extra WC, the fact that teams have been working the entire offseason to construct their rosters without knowing exactly how many teams will make the postseason is ridiculous.
sorry--but that absotively posolutely does not jibe with the facts--they were up 2.5 games on Sept 21, then went 3-8 in their last 11, but in NONE of those games did they start the scrubeenies. They used the same lineup that they had been using all year. So who(m), pray tell, were they "getting healthy"?
Yeah, it sucks when that happens, like this:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/postseason/1990_WS.shtml
or this,
http://www.baseball-reference.com/postseason/1987_WS.shtml
Do you think it really effects preparation much?
http://www.baseball-reference.com/postseason/1990_WS.shtml
or this,
http://www.baseball-reference.com/postseason/1987_WS.shtml
As random as 7 games is, at least its seven games. If a 100 win team can't get their #### together in a 7 game series, so be it. But forcing a team that beat out another team by 10 games to beat them in a 1 game playoff is lame.
The '04 Red Sox won 98 games and finished 3 behind the 101-win Yankees. In the new set-up, they would have played a play-in game against the 91-win Oakland A's.
I can't think of a single way that 5 teams instead of 4 impacts roster construction.
I think it could easily affect roster constuction and the decisions that go it. If you think you're team is close to contending, you may be willing to spend a little more for an extra bat or reliever. When making those decisions, knowing just how many teams will be eligible for the postseason seems like relevant information, yes.
Red Sox in 04. Also, there were like 5 teams since 04 that finished second with 95 wins and were 6-8 games ahead of the team that would have been the second WC in the proposed format.
EDIT: Also, the 02 Angels finished second with 99 wins and the 01 A's finished second with 102 wins. They would have faced 93 and 85 win teams respectively with the proposed format. So the 102 win A's would have faced a team they finished 17 games ahead of in a 1-game playoff.
See my first edit above, you are wrong.
2002 AL. Angels win 99 to finish second in the AL West. Red Sox and Mariners each win 93. Presumably, that sets up a 1-game playoff to determine one of the particpants in the one-game playoff
And that's an argument against the 2nd WC?
That's an argument against the wild card, period. Being first in line amongst the losers shouldn't earn awards.
It depends how you get there. If the division leaders are playing their asses off down to the wire to try to avoid that one-game playoff, and some vastly inferior second WC gets to cruise into the playoffs, setting up their rotation in the process - that's an argument against the second wild card.
The second wild card solves exactly one legitimate problem - that teams in the same division with the WC as a fallback don't play hard for the division title. But it creates many more problems of various sizes, not the least of which is intentional invitation of even less-deserving teams into the postseason.
For some people, many of whom probably haven't given ample consideration to the potential problems the second WC creates, simply solving the first problem is good enough. Others don't think the small gain outweighs the negatives.
If we also get the NL to go back to allowing the entire team, plus ballboys, on the mound during pitching changes and one set of umps to start wearing the bubble protector again, I'm in.
So winning a randomly assigned division(I know it's geography, but still pretty random) is more important than actually being the better team?
The gap in the 2002 NL is pretty significant too. The Giants finished second in the division with 95 wins, and the next best team was the 84-win Astros.
In 1997, the 96-win Yankees would have had to play the 84-win Angels.
At least it's better than when I was a kid, and the NL East Cardinals played against the NL West Braves in the 82 playoffs. Plus you had Cincinnati in the West and Chicago in the East.
Absolutely. Which is why, ultimately, I prefer sticking with the system with fewer teams, every time. I'd go back to two divisions (or hell, 14-16 teams fighting a season-long battle for a single pennant) in a heartbeat, but that ain't happening. So I'll just rage against this newest advancement, which, let's face it, will bring the next two-team addition to the postseason potluck just a little closer to fruition.
I think a large number of people both inside the game and fans view that as a positive not a negative. I understand why you disagree but I think such a view is heavily in the minority (probably not here, but among the public at large).
As practical problems I think the only concern that I can see is a situation where on the final day of the season the 95 win Red Sox and Yankees blow out their Ace starter and best relievers to try and win the division while the 90 win Rays are able to set up their pitching for the one game playoff. I think that is a meaningful unfairness to the "superior" teams.
Amen!
Fans of the Yankees would be unhappy for their team, but happy the Red Sox were crippled. Fans of the Red Sox would be unhappy for their team, but happy the Yankees were crippled. Fans of the other 28 teams would just be happy.
Sounds good to me.
Concur. Lets scrap divisions & go back to a nine game World Series.
Not only would this even out the quality of the divisions, but Cleveland and Pittsburgh are east of Tampa Bay and Atlanta anyway.
(not sure if this is what you meant)
That pt. would be better made if all teams played all their games with the exact same lineup at the exact same moment in time, but that is an impossibility. If you want to know the answer to the question: which team is better at this moment in time, at a certain place on earth, then you are going to have to relax and not put all your eggs in the 162 game basket. and you're going to have playoff games that mean more than regular season games...
That sums it up for me. There will be some good outcomes, and there will be some unforeseen bad ones. Just to foresee one of them, let's say that not only are 99-win Tampa Bay and Toronto (let's say) going into their last series fighting like mad for the division title, but Toronto is playing that final series against 89-win Baltimore, which has just clinched the fifth playoff spot. Suddenly you have a team (the Orioles) that should rest up to win its WC game, but the Integrity of the Game demands that they go like hell to beat Toronto, which gives them less chance of beating the Jays in the only game (for them) that counts. Et cetera.
That is what he meant, but it's only true if you look at it from East to West. If you start with the Central and move outward, as good people do, then Cleveland is a far more logical choice than Tampa, and Pittsburgh more sensible than Atlanta.
Seriously, I think the divisions are about as reasonable as possible under the current league alignments. Separating Florida and Atlanta (and Pittsburgh and Cincy) doesn't make a lot of sense despite what the longitudinal coordinates suggest, and separating Cleveland from its Midwestern brethren and replacing them with Tampa Bay (and its abundance of transplants from the NE corridor) makes even less sense.
Because under the old/current system, there's no practical difference between winning your division and winning the wild card. In both cases, you have to win a best-of-5, then a best-of-7 to make the World Series. The division winner potentially gets home-field advantage, but that doesn't matter all that much in playoff baseball.
Under the new/proposed system, if you don't win your division, you have to play a one-game play-in game against another wild card team before you get to the best-of-5/best-of-7 portion of the playoffs. The division winner gets a free pass to the best-of-5 round.
So, it creates more incentive to try to win your division rather than settling for backing into the playoffs via the Wild Card.
It weakens the position of the indivdual wild card participants. It doesn't make a wild card team meaningfully less likely to reach/win the World Series.
It depends on your definition of "meaningfully", I suppose, but I would think that the Wild Card team will be a bigger underdog in its first series against a division winner than it is now, simply because it's likely that the Wild Card team will have their pitching rotation less optimized, because of having to use one of their starters in the play-in game.
Aren't all the decisions you describe made later in the year around the trading deadline? 'Buyers' and 'sellers' and all that jazz?
That's wrong. If a true talent 98 win team and 85 win team square off, the 85 win team will win the 1-game playoff and advance some percentage of the time. So you've replaced a 98-win team with the 85-win team, and thus the "wild card representative" would have worse odds. Occassionally that 85-win team will beat the odds and win a title, and I understand why that occurence, enabled by expanded playoffs and a small sample size, will bother some. But over a larger sample this will lead to less wild card teams winning a World Series. You can't argue both sides of that coin.
I don't know about that. It will depend on a lot of factors, including days off under the new plan (and what pitchers the WC had to use in the one game), but it won't be out of the question that the WC survivor can still get two starts from its ace in the division round. And one thing I've concluded watching the playoffs all these many years is that the starting pitching advantage we see before the series starts hardly ever materializes the way we anticipate.
OTOH, if you start the Division Series the day after the WC game, that would strengthen the disadvantage of the WC survivor.
Then again, this should raise the issue of how much you want to weaken the WC survivor's chances (and, correspondingly, increase the division winner's chances). If the Angels and Rays finish tied with the best record in the AL, and the Angels win whatever tiebreaker method is used to give them HFA (despite, possibly, playing in a weaker division), do we want a system where they have a much greater opportunity to advance to the ALCS than the Rays?*
* BTW, I'm not even sure how I feel, just that these things are all considerations worth discussing.
That's a reasonable point. The degree of inferiority of the second WC would affect the overall chances of the WC advancing to the WS, though it would be small in what remains a very crapshooty enterprise. Whether that qualifies as meaningful is up to you.
I think it's an ongoing process. Look at a team like the Nationals. The Nats look like a team that could contend for a postseason berth if things break right, but may be more likely to be a year or two away. The Nats brass might be willing to expand the budget a little for an FA acqusition, or make a trade that may help them a little more now, if they felt they had a contender. And whether they have think they have a contender can be affected by the size of the potseason. If the number of playoff spots available to them is 33 percent larger than it has been under the current system, or just as important, that playoff contention (and what that means to a team trying to build a fan base) may be reached at a lower level of performance, that very well could make the difference in decisions they make right now.
The 98 win team and the 85 win team will have essentially equal odds of winning the one-game playoff. Outcomes of five and seven-game series aren't much less random than that. That means that worse teams will be getting World Championships.
It's already upsetting that fans think winning the virtually random tournament after the season is more meaningful and important than actually being the best team, but diluting that tournament further makes the situation even worse.
While the effect of this will be bad, it's hard to say how bad . . . a few months ago I looked at all the Game 1 outcomes of MLB post-season series since divisional play began, and saw that the winner of Game 1 won the ensuing series almost 70 percent of the time. That would mean that 70 percent of the time, the outcome with a one-game playoff and with a best-of-x series would have been the same. I was surprised that winning Game 1 carried that much of an advantage.
I think they valued it about right. If they couldn't win a game in Minneapolis, they didn't belong in the playoffs anyway, and as it turned out they won two, going away. Then they had to go to Arlington, but consider: the Rangers had never won a postseason game in Texas in franchise history, and they didn't win Game One against the Yankees, either, eliminating their HFA. (We were calling it "HFD" by that point.) The Rangers took control of that series in the Bronx in Games Three and Four. I think the single-game HFA in baseball postseason series is sometimes massively overrated.
And, on average, a better team will win the WS by facing worse opponents in subsequent rounds. The odds aren't "even". This isn't one-sided. It's expanding the range in both directions.
I agree. I'd love to see a study on postseason HFA and how much it really matters. HFA is already pretty small in baseball, and some of that may be related to travel (playing two or three series in a row on the road vs. a team being home for long stretches), and other issues, which may not be present in the postseason (for instance, the travel demands are similar before a series and identical once the series starts).
The flip side of that is a year like 2010 when the Rays and Yankees were sleepwalking to the finish line and of course there have been other years (1996 NL West, 2005 AL East to name a couple) where a division deciding game was played under much different and lesser circumstances than it would be now.
And of course last year was unusual. I'm sure it is just as likely that we'll have a year where the 2nd Wild Card comes down to the final day with some drama (although hoping for such drama in that final day's games is probably a little optimistic).
That assumes those are the only options. What if this season gets to game 162 with the standings as;
New York 95-66
Texas 93-68
Boston 93-68
TB 90-71
LA 90-71
Now you've got the same drama as last year with Tampa and LA playing for everything.
Look, last year was phenomenal from a fan standpoint (assuming you weren't a Sox or Braves fan) but part of the reason for that is how unusual it was. Last year never happens if the Wild Card doesn't exist yet I distinctly remember fears that "1993 will never happen again" and I'm sure we heard that "1967 will never happen again" when the 1969 divisional split occurred.
There will be years with spectacular drama and years with less drama (many many more of the latter). Ultimately my feeling is that once you accept the reality that we are going to have a minimum of 4 playoff teams that this new structure that truly rewards the division winners makes more sense than the structure we have had for the last 17 seasons.
Then the battle for the final spot is Rays vs Angels and Cardinals vs Giants. Wouldn't have been as exciting and wouldn't have gone down to the final day last year. But for this year nobody has any idea whether the race between 4-5 or between 5-6 will be the close one.
There is no single playoff format for maximum excitement. Each year will offer an ideal number of teams eligible, and an ideal way of configuring them, for the best finish. Those change year to year.
So unless MLB wanted to enact a floating playoff concept (the size and shape of the potseason not determined until after the regular season has been completed*), then no solution is perfect. All playoff expansions solve one or two problems while creating an equal or greater number of problems that didn't previously exist. So I'll always opt for the system that allows the fewest number of teams in, because each expansion of the playoffs undeniably serves to water down the regular season's importance just a little more.
* Which I'd go for in a heartbeat.
Generally I agree with this. I think having the Wild Card = Division Winner doesn't make sense though so I prefer 5 to 4 in this case.
That would be truly wonderful.
Totally agree. That inane 1 game playoff is a train wreck just waiting to happen. No postseason series should be less than 3 of 5.
The only difference is how good you want the teams fighting for the playoffs to be. Last year the battle was between ~90 win teams. In the last great pennant race of 1993 the battle between the Braves and Giants was between ~100 win teams. Though that was rare in the divisional era. To have that kind of battle regularly you'd have to go back to no divisions, 1st place only goes to the world series.
Once the new WC is in place the battle will be between 87-88 win teams.
Yes. This will generally lower the cutoff point between win or go home (while adding the potential for meaningful competition in one of the divisions in each league, which is what makes it the least bit palatable).
Getting back to this, the bigger issue comes up when the two division leaders tie and the second wild card has long been set. Logic suggests that you would need to go to a 1-game playoff (considering what's at stake), but that puts the loser in an even less enviable position against the inferior WC.
I like it. 95 wins gets a team in the play-offs.
Completely disagree.
If you can't win your division you face the play-in game. If you don't like it, win the division. A 3 of 5 wildcard series would screw the division winners with an overly long delay.
As others have said, why should winning some geography/baseball contest be more important than a ****ing 162 game season being decided in a one-game playoff? Why not have the NFL's WC games be sudden death games? Think how exciting that would be!!! How does it make any sense that the *longest* sport (by regular season games) should have a the shortest playoff round? It's just the further dilution of baseball. All-Star game? Make everyone an AS! People love 1 game playoffs? Have one every year!
And that 'getting rusty stuff' is crap. Play real/full speed games against each other if you have to.
...though I fail to see how resting minor injuries is going to make you rusty. I would think the extra time off was an advantage. Study games, your opponents, work on basics, pitcher fielding practice.
This seems like typical Seligulan sleight of hand. Deflected attention from the what to the when.
As I've mentioned many times, the new system means that NY and BOS will miss out much more often than before.
So are you opposed to all playoffs? Shouldn't we have just handed the World Championship trophy to the Phillies after the last day of the season like English Premier League does?
This is exactly the problem with the 1-game format. It doesn't answer who's better, just "who won today?" A 162 game season is more relevant than a one-game play-in to a greater ratio that a 1-game play-in is more relevant than a coin flip. [i.e., 162/1 > 1/coin flip].
And that 'getting rusty stuff' is crap. Play real/full speed games against each other if you have to.
...though I fail to see how resting minor injuries is going to make you rusty. I would think the extra time off was an advantage. Study games, your opponents, work on basics, pitcher fielding practice.
Because Baseball has always been about winning your "division", even when that division was the whole league. No one ever said the two teams with the best record should face in the WS, regardless of league. Likewise in the two division era, we had the '87 Twins who had a worse record than four teams in the East (in an era of balanced schedules), as the most glaring example of how the geography/baseball case has always mattered the most.
Hell, in the balanced schedule AL, you had one of the two best teams not in the playoffs in '72,'78,'79,'80,'82,'84,'85,'87,'88,'89, and '90. That's almost half the time, and no one complained. With the unbalanced schedule, it didn't happen as much in the NL, but it still did in '73,'74,'78,'79,'80,'85,'87 and '93.
The whole idea that regular season raw record should matter so much is new. The WC teams are lucky to still be playing at all after 162. I love the fact that they are hugely disadvantaged. I hope they put zero off days before the DS.
I don't think anyone is arguing this. We are saying that this isn't really a good thing, if the point is to reward the best teams.
Sure, why not?
Right, I think a lot of us think this is bad and should be fixed.
If they played a balanced schedule and then threw in a couple tournament style competitions separate from the regular league season, why not?
Really, the problem of a marathon being decided by a separate sprint has been with us since 1903, if not the Temple Cup or the even earlier concept of a "whip pennant" (to be held by the last team that beat its holder in a game, à la boxing championship belts). If you object to the sprint in principle, then you probably don't really like the World Series in principle either.
Expanded playoffs IMO aren't bad because they are short or because they don't reward greater success in the first 154 or 162 games. They're bad (to the extent that any baseball could ever be bad) because the more there are of something, the less any one something means. Bobby Thomson hits a walkoff home run in a Game Three of a single 2-of-3 series for a pennant, and lives forever. Nelson Cruz hits one in the second game of one of two 4-of-7s for a pennant, that follow a first round of four 3-of-5s, and that was remembered for as long as it took to drive home afterwards. Don Larsen pitches a perfect game in the World Series and joins Thomson in lore; Roy Halladay pitches a no-hitter in a Game One of a very long month of baseball and hey, nice game Roy. Dilution of a big event does not make it better.
My take is that I really liked the two leagues, two divisions, two postseason series baseball that I grew up with. The stakes in the postseason were always high, and the stakes in the regular season were high for pretty much everyone, and the quality of play in the postseason was great. With the addition of the wild cards, the quality of play in the postseason has gone down, but it's turned out that you can add another round to the playoffs without losing the high stakes. I'd rather not have the wild card, but I do love the expanded postseason. The big loss has been pennant races - now if a team is really good, they're in the playoffs pretty much regardless. That's a trade-off I don't like.
I also recognize that there's no going back to four playoff teams out of 28 clubs, let along out of 30 or 32. So this reform offers the possibility of increasing the stakes in the regular season for very good clubs trying to avoid the play-in game, while adding another high-stakes game to the season. On the downside, it risks letting a worse team have a shot at the world series and hurting the quality of play in the postseason. There's also the slippery slope risk that adding a fifth team could lead to football style playoff armageddon.
I get the arguments from the other side - I think that football style armageddon is very unlikely, because no owner will shorten the regular season (gate receipts), the postseason is already pushing beyond the seasonal bounds of playing baseball outside, and teams don't want a weeklong rest. And I think that increasing the likelihood of real (division) pennant races between top teams and adding an exciting 163rd game to every season is an improvement worth the risk of letting a lesser team have a shot at the championship.
If you consider the NL and AL separate leagues(and given that they didn't play in the regular season and had different league offices, different umpires, etc, there is a very good argument that they were), then the pre-division set up where the two league winners met in the WS was fine.
Completely disagree.
If you can't win your division you face the play-in game. If you don't like it, win the division. A 3 of 5 wildcard series would screw the division winners with an overly long delay.
As many others have noted, in practice this gives a big advantage to teams in weak divisions and a big disadvantage to teams in strong divisions. Of course when you've got 30 teams and no chance of eliminating divisions altogether, there's never going to be a postseason that doesn't have elements of "unfairness" or "injustice", but to let an 85 win team be able to eliminate a 99 win team in a one game shootout is worse than anything we've seen to date. Geography should not determine who gets to avoid crapshoots like this, but since we can't eliminate geography, we can do away with the crapshoot.
And those "overly long delays" can often be a blessing in letting players recover from minor injuries, or in enabling a team to recalibrate its rotation. They're hardly a one-sided curse.
And in fact it was fine---when you had 8 teams per league and baseball was operating on a financial scale about a hundredth as big as it is today. There's always going to be a pull between aesthetics/tradition/fairness and money, and in most cases I come down on the former side. But there's no way on Earth that you'll ever sell either the owners or the networks on a setup where there's a distinct possibility of 28 teams playing out the string after Labor Day. There's about as much chance of eliminating the wild card system as there is of moving the Braves back to Boston and the Dodgers back to Brooklyn.
At least the 99-win team has a chance to prove their superiority on the field. The 96-win 1987 Toronto Blue Jays were eliminated by the 87-win Minnesota Twins, playing essentially the exact same schedule, despite the Blue Jays having beaten the Twins 9-3 in the season series, with no chance for the Blue Jays to even play a 1-game playoff against them.
If the point was to determine who the best team in major-league baseball was using the most objective criteria possible, they wouldn't have playoffs at all.
And while you're at it, the Tigers beat the Twins 8-4 in the regular season that year. In a perfectly fair and just world, the schedule makers would have known in advance that the Tigers and Blue Jays were going to be the two best teams in the AL, and placed one of them in the AL West. In the real world, that may pose a few problems. But in the real world, it's absolutely crazy to schedule a one game crapshoot that gives a well rested 90 win wild card team a chance to put its ace against a 99 win wild card team that only lost its division on the last day of the season and has to use its # 4 starter in an elimination game.
They also eliminated the 91 win Brewers, and the 89 win Yankees.
Why? The entire point of a playoff system is that teams that already proved they were "better" than other teams have to beat them again in the playoffs. How is that any crazier than giving the 2011 Cardinals another crack at beating the Brewers, or any crazier than letting the '87 Twins into the playoffs instead of 3 "better" teams because the Twin Cities are located west of Toronto, Milwaukee, and New York?
If you don't like the inherent unfairness of playoffs in general, that's fine. But I don't see how the unfairness of making a non-division winner win one more game to earn its way into the semi(edit: quarter)-finals is suddenly a bridge too far.
I don't think it's a bridge too far. I just find it a bridge to nowhere.
The two WC system solves one problem. That's it. Yes, it's a real problem, particularly when teams stop caring about winning games in September on the few occasions that's happened. But I just don't think creating a bunch of new problems to solve one problem is good for the game, and I'm somewhat surprised that so many baseball fans who, I think, would otherwise rail against the expansion of the playoffs are so uninterested in the myriad potential downsides of this latest maneuver.
Most of us are resigned to the fact that if the owners think they can make more money by expanding the playoffs, they are going to expand the playoffs. This idea for the second WC is at least a compromise in that it puts the two non-division winners at a distinct disadvantage.
Agree. I hate the whole thing unreservedly; but horrifyingly, it could probably be worse.
Agreed. I'm just glad they only added one game, and not a whole nother round.
Would I prefer to go back to 4 divisions, winners only? Sure. But that just doesn't fly with 30 teams.
The potential downsides are relatively marginal because of this - the new team might be a less deserving champion, and they might cut into the quality of play in the playoffs. Those are real downsides, but I think they only exacerbate existing problems to a small degree. That downside seems worth the possible increase in good playoff races between good teams.
It's always been in the back of my mind, but I'm starting to come around to the idea that a split-season is a better idea than anything else. Scale it back to two divisions in each league and go with that. If the same team wins the division in both halves, just go with the best second-place record. Add an extra home game or two in the first round for a team that wins both halves, so they aren't just playing out the string in the second half.
No more wild-cards, two potential races in each division every year, more exciting Septembers. I'd make the trade deadline at the end of the first half, which would make it more exciting, too. Teams would be less likely to dump players if they had a brand-new slate with everyone at 0-0 immediately ahead.
It's an expansion of the playoffs. The number of games they get to play in isn't as important as the fact that an additional, less-deserving team is invited in.
Those aren't the only downsides, which is the point I was making. Many of us have listed a bunch of potential downsides because of this that go beyond simply an occasionally weaker champion and a lesser quality playoffs. Those have been largely ignored in the quest to solve the one problem. I understand why baseball's doing it, as Randy (I think that's Randy) noted above. And I know I'm powerless to stop it. But here is where we debate stuff like this, and I've been somewhat surprised that the singleminded determination to make division championships more meaningful (an objective I support) has left folks indifferent potential negatives associated with this solution.
Aaargh. As I keep saying, more of a good thing is not necessarily better :)
The camel's nose has been in the tent since the league got suckered into allowing second-place teams a chance at the World Series. Now the camel's whole head is in by allowing an even lesser team a shot at a title. If the Budshoviks get their way we'll have NBA-style playoffs and .500 teams in the World Series in our lifetimes.
Secondarily, as discussed yesterday, there are benefits to those that strive for "best team wins" results, in that wild card teams will now win the World Series less frequently. It seems some of the people in this thread against the move are doing so, at least in part, for this reason, when they have it backwards. If you want the teams with the best record to win the World Series more often, this is a move that helps that goal. On occassion you will see a stray winner that is even worse than experienced prior, but on average better teams will win the World Series.
I see this as a fantastic solution. An extra playoff game, hurts the wild card teams, adds more incentive to September baseball? Sign me up. Sure, that one game, and maybe other series if the lesser team advances, are of "lesser quality", but we're still talking about 85-95 win teams here. The Mariners aren't being let in. It's still very good baseball.
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