The amazing aspect of this is that baseball is having its cake and eating it too. People seem to really believe that the best team in the end will win the World Series, and that teams that don’t have something intrinsically wrong with them. After all, if fans had actually lost confidence in the system, would anybody be watching?

There seems to me a big difference, however, between

(1) being convinced that the best team (or athlete) has won a championship and

(2) enjoying a championship event and appreciating the performance that goes into winning it.

There are sports where the championships, or at least the huge marquee events, are much more crapshooty than baseball. Classic horse races get their appeal from being gambling propositions. College basketball in March. Golf majors.

And then there are sports that have less crapshooty championships: tennis majors; track and field worlds and Olympics; the NBA playoffs, at least in years when Dallas doesn't finish 67-15 and lose in the first *&%#ing round.

Really, what's the problem? That the baseball postseason is more wide-open than Wimbledon but less so than the Kentucky Derby?

This is sports. The baseball postseason is set up not so that the Platonic ideal of the best team wins but so that somebody will win eleven games in October and get a big trophy. The idea is to enjoy watching them actually win those games. If some better team wants to beat them, they are very welcome to do so :)

This is sports. The baseball postseason is set up not so that the Platonic ideal of the best team wins but so that somebody will win eleven games in October and get a big trophy. The idea is to enjoy watching them actually win those games. If some better team wants to beat them, they are very welcome to do so :)

I fully agree.

The problem with this year's post-season tournament was that nearly every one of the series was a blowout. Ho-hum. That's the way it goes sometimes.

Agree, agree.

There's way too much emphasis on trying to perfect any postseason set-up. Every league uses some arbitrary measure for the way they do things, wild card, best of 5, 7, home field, 2-3-2, 2-2-1-1-1, bye weeks, etc. it is all arbitrary. Fans/media need to calm down and ask themselves what they are looking for when watching sports.

I want to see teams at a high level perform at a high level, and if I get a 4-game sweep, a 55-10 super bowl, a 62-24 Fiesta Bowl, a 30 point UNLV win over Duke, or a 15 stroke U.S. Open victory, that's the way it goes. Not every event needs to end perfectly, and sometimes the best drama during a season happens way before it intuitively seems to supposed to happen.

College football is a perfect example of this, the MNC BCS games are rarely barnburners, just like the Super Bowl is often a bust. Yet, despite a lack of bracketed playoff system, college football (if you are a fan) provides some of the most unbelievable drama from August through December, when nobody, or at least the cliff-note NFL fans, aren't even paying attention. Then they show up and the press demands to know where's the playoff? You missed it.

In MLB, it may be a Aug/September collapse, or a great DS, or LCS, which leads to the supposed 'best team' not even appearing in the WS. Unless you want to go back to two leagues, no playoffs, this will happen in every single league, and often.

Wow, he must really hate the NCAA tournament, the #1 and #2 teams almost never face each other in the finals.

Unlike the NCAA, where the obvious solution is staring TPTB in the face, no obvious solution exists for baseball to better ensure the best team actually wins it all.

This is an odd year to complain. First, there was no obvious best team which makes it the best possible scenario to justify the goodness of a playoff. And then, of those teams, the team that appeared to be the best proved themselves to be the best.

Those who make a fetish out of the regular season (like Joe Sheehan--my least favourite baseball writer who needs a good kick in the face) need to get off their high horse. The playoffs go a long way to crowning the best team and are, in fact, the best way of doing so.