We are a little more than one-quarter of the way into the season … and already these are the teams with a less than one percent chance of making the postseason:
It's funny to look back on this story now, when the Guardians have clinched the Central, the Phillies are currently in a playoff spot, and the O's are still alive. Almost like you don't know what's going to happen the rest of the way on May 30!
The owners want more playoffs because that means more money for them. Attendance, TV, etc. They will use whatever rationale they can to get that through the collective-bargaining agreement.
Hard-core baseball fans just like to watch baseball – whether their teams are in the hunt or not, whether it’s a regular season game or a playoff game. Preferably in person, but also on TV.
Casual sports fans just like entertainment and excitement.
So the owners choose the format that makes them more money, and creates more entertainment end excitement, to hopefully create more casual sports fan interest. Unfortunately, they don’t give a shit about the hardcore baseball fans. Because, the real hardcore baseball fans are still going to watch no matter what.
I completely disagree with this. Although it is certainly more fun when the Royals, A's and/or Padres are in contention, I still enjoy following those teams even when they suck, which two of them do this year. I watch to see if they can win today's game. I watch to see how many batters the A's and Royals will start who have an OPS under .500 and/or a BA under .200. I watch because it is fun and entertaining, even if my team isn't very good.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. It seems utterly pointless to play this many games to have almost half the teams then qualify for the postseason. I’m English and for us the concept of the best team winning the league is sacred, although I love the baseball postseason and the drama it brings. As you say though it should be the top teams only otherwise it’s massively devalued. Sometimes less is more..
Hi Joe - I love your columns and have been an avid reader for the past 10-15 years, across many platforms. I almost always end up agreeing with your sentiments, but not this time.
First, I don't think that more teams making the playoffs reduces interest in the regular season. It may reduce the importance of the regular season, but it absolutely increases the interest for many fans. You argue that decreased importance in the regular season drives less interest, but, perhaps counter-intuitively, the opposite is true in this case...: for many years, only 2 or 4 teams made the playoffs, and by June, the vast majority of the teams would be out of it. These days, half or more still have realistic chances. Run your analysis for, say 1952 or 1972 or 1992, and I would bet significantly less than half the teams would have had a realistic chance come June.
In addition, for the teams that are near locks for the playoffs (Yankees, Dodgers, Mets, etc.) there are still very high stakes - a first round bye, or at least playing at home for the entire first round. With more playoff spots, and a clear differentiation between the type of qualifications, I think that the interest level of many more fans than in the past will stay intact. For example, I'm a Mets fan, so of course this year I am very engaged. But if in the past I would closely follow the NLE race, now I also closely follow the Mets' rivals for a top 2 spot - Dodgers, Brewers, Padres ... the regular season race has become much more engaging and broader in scope.
Second, there is still "a lot at stake": while of course it is true that more playoff spots devalue the regular season, it isn't "as bad" as the NBA. 12 isn't 16, and for now, there is still clear differentiation and clear benefit for finishing in the top 2 or 4 spots per league. The risk of a mediocre to below average team winning, with additional rounds and an all-away first round, isn't that large. As of now - no losing team would make the playoffs (you mentioned the Braves, but right now they aren't slated for a playoff spot - Dodgers, Mets, Brewers, Padres, Giants and Cards are ahead), and aside from abnormal seasons such as 1980 or 2020 - that hasn't happened yet. And even in the past, we have had situations of .500 teams almost winning it (yay the 82-79 Ya Gatta Believe Mets of '73!), so it's not like the old formats locked those chances out.
I would suggest seeing how this new format pans out before we completely trash on it. It devalues the regular season somewhat, sure, but I highly doubt it reduces interest in it.
Thanks for saving me the effort of writing 🙂 it does seem to be that when the goalposts were moved in so that only 2 or 4 or 8 teams qualified then there would be less to play for sooner for more teams... Seems like basic math 🤷♂️
Nothing to play for seems a bit of an oversell here. I agree that adding too many playoff teams weakens the whole thing and makes the playoffs less meaningful. I thought that three division winners and two wild cards was just about perfect, especially it kept the chances of a non-division-winner taking the crown at the same level, given the play-in game.
But it simply isn't the case that nothing appreciably changes from June to October. In each of the last three seasons, four teams that were slated for playoff spots (using this 6-team per league system) On June 1 would not have made the playoffs in October. The three years before that, it was an average of three teams per season. In 2014 it was 5 teams from the end of May who wouldn't make the cut four months later.
With that said, in 2017 the last AL playoff spot would have had to go to one of three 80-82 teams. Traditionally MLB always decides these with playoff games. So we would all have had to sit through some kind of round-robin between three losing teams (the Royals, Angels and Rays) to decide who got to play the 102-win Cleveland club. (And probably beat them, let's be honest.😉 )
So we obviously don't want that kind of scenario. Cleveland deserves to be beaten, at a minimum, by a team with a winning record. Fans deserve not to have to sit through nearly a week of ostensibly playoff baseball to determine which of three losing teams is the least worst.
But of course these scenarios are all based on the actual standings from years past, before this system was in place. Presumably, with a playoff berth in site, one of those three teams would have done more at the deadline to shore up their team and make a more concerted run at the playoffs. Not the Royals, obviously, or probably the Rays, though they do a bit more of that these days.
So I agree that adding more and more teams to the playoff picture is generally bad, but I disagree about it making the regular season meaningless.
Besides, as attached as everyone is to the record books and the lore of single season records and career records predicated on players playing 162-game seasons (of which we have now had more than we had of 154-game seasons) I don't see that the Powers that mlB will ever change that, even if it would be fun and interesting or whatever to change things up.
If there's no money in it they won't do it. And if everyone just throws up their hands and stops watching because none of their beloved records make any sense anymore, then nobody will tune into any "regular" season games at all, and giant piles of money will be lost.
How come no one has pointed out that Joe's lament about a losing team (Atlanta) having the last playoff spot is wrong. As of this morning the last team in would be the Giants (26-21).
Yeah, but it's an easy mistake - I've had to recheck the 2022 format 3 times already (including now) because of the 2020, 2021 and proposals this offseason.
Since adding weaker teams to playoffs makes season less relevant, shorten the season. Heck. After a couple months play, simply have an elimination tournament open to ALL TEAMS. March Madness single elimination style, with last 8 teams playing 5 game series until LCS (7 games!), then WS! Done by July. Everyone gets August vacation before schools, dreaded football, etc.
The latest labor negotiation was a gigantic failure for the fans. A better outcome, both for fans and for players, would have been the institution of a hard salary cap and floor, so that there is more parity among teams, and the dollars are spread more equitably among the players. Would the star players feel aggrieved if they "only" made $15 mill./year rather than $30 mill., and the minimum salary was $1.2 million, rather than $570,500? If the cap were, for example, $185 million, it would result in greater parity among the teams. As it stands today, the Dodgers, Yankees, and Mets are all north of $260 million, so as Joe points out, more than half of the teams are eliminated from post season play by June 1. Absent some changes to the structure of the game, the MLB will be irrelevant to the vast majority of fans outside of cities touting bloated payrolls. Fan apathy will result in reduced team revenues, which in turn will result in reduced contracts for players. Very reminiscent of our federal government-reactive rather than proactive. Sad.
"Absent some changes to the structure of the game, the MLB will be irrelevant to the vast majority of fans outside of cities touting bloated payrolls." - This comment seems to imply that there was a time when this wasn't true. During most of the "original 16" World Series pre-expansion era, (1903 - 1960) every year would begin with at least 4 teams in each league (half) that had no chance at winning the pennant. Look at the Phillies, White Sox, Senators, Browns, A's, Braves -- some of these teams had decades long stretches with no chance of a pennant. Baseball has always been this way, but instead of 1 team out of 8 making the playoffs in each league, 6 out of 15 will make it. The more teams that can make the playoffs, the more fans that will be interested.
There wasn't much else to look at/go do from 1903-1960, at least not compared to today. Now you've got other growing, exciting sports (NFL is year round, soccer is growing, NBA finals, etc.) and a smartphone to take your attention. So even if your team was out of it, back in the day, going to the ballpark was a big deal. Now you've got 999999 other things you could do and if your team is out of it (like my last place Royals) it's hard to stay engaged
Nope. Check out attendance figures. If there was nothing else to do, then why was no one going to the games? Games were 1:45, 2 hours max. Tickets were cheaper in the 40s, 50s, 60s in relation to earnings than they are today. So were concessions. It was the Golden Age of Baseball, according to Donald Honig, David Halberstam, Roger Kahn, and countless other authors. And yet only 10K went to ted Williams's last game. Baseball is in better shape today, all things considered, than it was in 1940, 1950, 1960 or 1970.
This 100%. Baseball isn't like most other sports where if you can draft/get 1 or 2 good/great players, you can turn things around in a hurry. If the Royals got Mike Trout or Vlad Jr. would it really matter? Maybe a few wins at the end of the year but then it's just semantics between losing 110 games and losing 100 games. Without a floor/ceiling to allow teams to retain the best players and/or reduce the incentive for the top players to go to the high spending clubs, you're always going to have a bottom heavy system.
I don’t attend baseball games based on the standings (as a Mariners fan this should be obvious). I attend minor league games where I don’t even know the standings (which was ironic as my local team won the colorfully named “High A Central” last year) and college wood bat games. Because I enjoy a baseball game.
When MLB sold its soul to Fox and then ESPN and TBS, it took away any sense that the games were important in their own right, instead of because of ratings. We’ve been served up Yankees, Red Sox, Cubs and Dodgers ad infinitum, and some other teams have no national exposure at all. Which becomes a self-fulfilling ratings prophecy. From a national exposure standpoint, MLB is the English Premier League. So when a Houston or Washington or Atlanta is in the World Series, no one outside those markets has a clue who their players are and ratings are crap.
It takes vision to see that a sport can get national or even international attention by careful nurturing of the product without regard to size of market. Did anyone care that the Cleveland Cavaliers were in freaking Cleveland when LeBron played there? Did people tune out of the AFC championship game between Cincinnati and Kansas City?
I often think about just how bad MLB is at promoting itself. I watch an excessive amount of MLB Network and cannot tell you how often they lament the fact that Mike Trout doesn't get enough national exposure while hyping yet another Dodgers game set to air that night.
First, nobody watches ESPN any more so what they talk about is fairly irrelevant. They average about 600,000 viewers during the day in the US.
Second, more baseball is better than less baseball. "We have to do something about all this baseball" is not an argument that makes sense to me (and thankfully given the money involved, not something that needs to be seriously entertained).
But most importantly, we are literally just a season removed from 1. four teams in the AL East winning 91 games with the Blue Jays going home, 2. the Mariners winning 90 games and going home, 3. the Mets blowing a months-long division lead with the Braves coming from behind to win the East, 4. the Cardinals going on an absurd run to win a Wild Card, and 5. the Padres collapsing down the stretch to fall completely out of contention.
If the season ended on Memorial Day last year, the Indians and A's would have been in, the Yankees out in the AL. In the NL, the Mets, Cubs, and Padres would have been in. I feel like every year we all collectively forget just how long the season is and why it is. Will be interesting to revisit this all in September.
It can also be true that sometimes seasons are just whiffs, not every season is going to be full of the drama and excitement we might want.
The bigger problem isn't the schedule, but competitive balance. This has been a problem in mlb for a long time and the luxury tax has done basically nothing to fix it. Part of the reason people talk about the nfl all year long is that the average NFL fan really can delude themselves into thinking their team could make the playoffs. Whether they are in a large or small market largely doesn't matter. But in baseball there is a clear division between big and small markets which means that, despite an occasional run like the royals had in 2014-2015, small market fans know they don't have much to cheer for. Over time that really degrades fan support and enthusiasm and prevents baseball from being the national game it once was.
Similar to what others have said: MLB can set their schedule, but they can't tell us what to care about. I think this "World Series or bust" mentality is harmful, throughout American sports. It makes some sense when the World Series winner actually is (often) the best team in baseball. But no one thinks that anymore, or really even claims to. The WS champ is treated more as "this year's lucky winner!" than the true best team. So in today's game it's particularly strange to only care about the World Series.
We say that the expanded playoffs cheapen the regular season, but in my opinion they cheapen the PLAYOFFS. The regular season is still intact, and still (mostly) tells us which teams are the best. Then there's a fast-paced fun tournament to cap off the season, and if your team catches fire and wins the thing, awesome! But we probably won't see the best teams play each other, and even if they do, the series have always been too short to see who is the very best.
I'm not saying that this is how the league, the media, or even the teams themselves see it, but I've slowly been moving in that direction ever since the addition of the second Wild Card. And it's great! I root for my team to make the playoffs, win the division, win 100 games, have the best record in the league. Every day contributes to (or detracts from) those goals. I'm not going to lie: it frustrates me how everyone is willing to wipe that all away once the playoffs start. I really wish that MLB would recognize good and great regular seasons by teams to the extent that they recognize good and great regular seasons by players (playoff stats don't even really count in your career totals!). I wish teams would fight all season to get out of the cellar or to beat the rival team for third in the division. But even until that happens, I still find joy in the results that I believe matter more (the regular season), rather than just the results that the culture says matter more (the playoffs).
It's funny to look back on this story now, when the Guardians have clinched the Central, the Phillies are currently in a playoff spot, and the O's are still alive. Almost like you don't know what's going to happen the rest of the way on May 30!
The owners want more playoffs because that means more money for them. Attendance, TV, etc. They will use whatever rationale they can to get that through the collective-bargaining agreement.
Hard-core baseball fans just like to watch baseball – whether their teams are in the hunt or not, whether it’s a regular season game or a playoff game. Preferably in person, but also on TV.
Casual sports fans just like entertainment and excitement.
So the owners choose the format that makes them more money, and creates more entertainment end excitement, to hopefully create more casual sports fan interest. Unfortunately, they don’t give a shit about the hardcore baseball fans. Because, the real hardcore baseball fans are still going to watch no matter what.
I completely disagree with this. Although it is certainly more fun when the Royals, A's and/or Padres are in contention, I still enjoy following those teams even when they suck, which two of them do this year. I watch to see if they can win today's game. I watch to see how many batters the A's and Royals will start who have an OPS under .500 and/or a BA under .200. I watch because it is fun and entertaining, even if my team isn't very good.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. It seems utterly pointless to play this many games to have almost half the teams then qualify for the postseason. I’m English and for us the concept of the best team winning the league is sacred, although I love the baseball postseason and the drama it brings. As you say though it should be the top teams only otherwise it’s massively devalued. Sometimes less is more..
P.S thanks for your consistently amazing words Joe, my favourite sports writing by a mile
Hi Joe - I love your columns and have been an avid reader for the past 10-15 years, across many platforms. I almost always end up agreeing with your sentiments, but not this time.
First, I don't think that more teams making the playoffs reduces interest in the regular season. It may reduce the importance of the regular season, but it absolutely increases the interest for many fans. You argue that decreased importance in the regular season drives less interest, but, perhaps counter-intuitively, the opposite is true in this case...: for many years, only 2 or 4 teams made the playoffs, and by June, the vast majority of the teams would be out of it. These days, half or more still have realistic chances. Run your analysis for, say 1952 or 1972 or 1992, and I would bet significantly less than half the teams would have had a realistic chance come June.
In addition, for the teams that are near locks for the playoffs (Yankees, Dodgers, Mets, etc.) there are still very high stakes - a first round bye, or at least playing at home for the entire first round. With more playoff spots, and a clear differentiation between the type of qualifications, I think that the interest level of many more fans than in the past will stay intact. For example, I'm a Mets fan, so of course this year I am very engaged. But if in the past I would closely follow the NLE race, now I also closely follow the Mets' rivals for a top 2 spot - Dodgers, Brewers, Padres ... the regular season race has become much more engaging and broader in scope.
Second, there is still "a lot at stake": while of course it is true that more playoff spots devalue the regular season, it isn't "as bad" as the NBA. 12 isn't 16, and for now, there is still clear differentiation and clear benefit for finishing in the top 2 or 4 spots per league. The risk of a mediocre to below average team winning, with additional rounds and an all-away first round, isn't that large. As of now - no losing team would make the playoffs (you mentioned the Braves, but right now they aren't slated for a playoff spot - Dodgers, Mets, Brewers, Padres, Giants and Cards are ahead), and aside from abnormal seasons such as 1980 or 2020 - that hasn't happened yet. And even in the past, we have had situations of .500 teams almost winning it (yay the 82-79 Ya Gatta Believe Mets of '73!), so it's not like the old formats locked those chances out.
I would suggest seeing how this new format pans out before we completely trash on it. It devalues the regular season somewhat, sure, but I highly doubt it reduces interest in it.
Thanks for saving me the effort of writing 🙂 it does seem to be that when the goalposts were moved in so that only 2 or 4 or 8 teams qualified then there would be less to play for sooner for more teams... Seems like basic math 🤷♂️
Nothing to play for seems a bit of an oversell here. I agree that adding too many playoff teams weakens the whole thing and makes the playoffs less meaningful. I thought that three division winners and two wild cards was just about perfect, especially it kept the chances of a non-division-winner taking the crown at the same level, given the play-in game.
But it simply isn't the case that nothing appreciably changes from June to October. In each of the last three seasons, four teams that were slated for playoff spots (using this 6-team per league system) On June 1 would not have made the playoffs in October. The three years before that, it was an average of three teams per season. In 2014 it was 5 teams from the end of May who wouldn't make the cut four months later.
With that said, in 2017 the last AL playoff spot would have had to go to one of three 80-82 teams. Traditionally MLB always decides these with playoff games. So we would all have had to sit through some kind of round-robin between three losing teams (the Royals, Angels and Rays) to decide who got to play the 102-win Cleveland club. (And probably beat them, let's be honest.😉 )
So we obviously don't want that kind of scenario. Cleveland deserves to be beaten, at a minimum, by a team with a winning record. Fans deserve not to have to sit through nearly a week of ostensibly playoff baseball to determine which of three losing teams is the least worst.
But of course these scenarios are all based on the actual standings from years past, before this system was in place. Presumably, with a playoff berth in site, one of those three teams would have done more at the deadline to shore up their team and make a more concerted run at the playoffs. Not the Royals, obviously, or probably the Rays, though they do a bit more of that these days.
So I agree that adding more and more teams to the playoff picture is generally bad, but I disagree about it making the regular season meaningless.
Besides, as attached as everyone is to the record books and the lore of single season records and career records predicated on players playing 162-game seasons (of which we have now had more than we had of 154-game seasons) I don't see that the Powers that mlB will ever change that, even if it would be fun and interesting or whatever to change things up.
If there's no money in it they won't do it. And if everyone just throws up their hands and stops watching because none of their beloved records make any sense anymore, then nobody will tune into any "regular" season games at all, and giant piles of money will be lost.
How come no one has pointed out that Joe's lament about a losing team (Atlanta) having the last playoff spot is wrong. As of this morning the last team in would be the Giants (26-21).
Yeah, but it's an easy mistake - I've had to recheck the 2022 format 3 times already (including now) because of the 2020, 2021 and proposals this offseason.
We were all waiting for you
Can they just make me the Commissioner already?
Since adding weaker teams to playoffs makes season less relevant, shorten the season. Heck. After a couple months play, simply have an elimination tournament open to ALL TEAMS. March Madness single elimination style, with last 8 teams playing 5 game series until LCS (7 games!), then WS! Done by July. Everyone gets August vacation before schools, dreaded football, etc.
The latest labor negotiation was a gigantic failure for the fans. A better outcome, both for fans and for players, would have been the institution of a hard salary cap and floor, so that there is more parity among teams, and the dollars are spread more equitably among the players. Would the star players feel aggrieved if they "only" made $15 mill./year rather than $30 mill., and the minimum salary was $1.2 million, rather than $570,500? If the cap were, for example, $185 million, it would result in greater parity among the teams. As it stands today, the Dodgers, Yankees, and Mets are all north of $260 million, so as Joe points out, more than half of the teams are eliminated from post season play by June 1. Absent some changes to the structure of the game, the MLB will be irrelevant to the vast majority of fans outside of cities touting bloated payrolls. Fan apathy will result in reduced team revenues, which in turn will result in reduced contracts for players. Very reminiscent of our federal government-reactive rather than proactive. Sad.
"Absent some changes to the structure of the game, the MLB will be irrelevant to the vast majority of fans outside of cities touting bloated payrolls." - This comment seems to imply that there was a time when this wasn't true. During most of the "original 16" World Series pre-expansion era, (1903 - 1960) every year would begin with at least 4 teams in each league (half) that had no chance at winning the pennant. Look at the Phillies, White Sox, Senators, Browns, A's, Braves -- some of these teams had decades long stretches with no chance of a pennant. Baseball has always been this way, but instead of 1 team out of 8 making the playoffs in each league, 6 out of 15 will make it. The more teams that can make the playoffs, the more fans that will be interested.
There wasn't much else to look at/go do from 1903-1960, at least not compared to today. Now you've got other growing, exciting sports (NFL is year round, soccer is growing, NBA finals, etc.) and a smartphone to take your attention. So even if your team was out of it, back in the day, going to the ballpark was a big deal. Now you've got 999999 other things you could do and if your team is out of it (like my last place Royals) it's hard to stay engaged
Nope. Check out attendance figures. If there was nothing else to do, then why was no one going to the games? Games were 1:45, 2 hours max. Tickets were cheaper in the 40s, 50s, 60s in relation to earnings than they are today. So were concessions. It was the Golden Age of Baseball, according to Donald Honig, David Halberstam, Roger Kahn, and countless other authors. And yet only 10K went to ted Williams's last game. Baseball is in better shape today, all things considered, than it was in 1940, 1950, 1960 or 1970.
This 100%. Baseball isn't like most other sports where if you can draft/get 1 or 2 good/great players, you can turn things around in a hurry. If the Royals got Mike Trout or Vlad Jr. would it really matter? Maybe a few wins at the end of the year but then it's just semantics between losing 110 games and losing 100 games. Without a floor/ceiling to allow teams to retain the best players and/or reduce the incentive for the top players to go to the high spending clubs, you're always going to have a bottom heavy system.
I don’t attend baseball games based on the standings (as a Mariners fan this should be obvious). I attend minor league games where I don’t even know the standings (which was ironic as my local team won the colorfully named “High A Central” last year) and college wood bat games. Because I enjoy a baseball game.
When MLB sold its soul to Fox and then ESPN and TBS, it took away any sense that the games were important in their own right, instead of because of ratings. We’ve been served up Yankees, Red Sox, Cubs and Dodgers ad infinitum, and some other teams have no national exposure at all. Which becomes a self-fulfilling ratings prophecy. From a national exposure standpoint, MLB is the English Premier League. So when a Houston or Washington or Atlanta is in the World Series, no one outside those markets has a clue who their players are and ratings are crap.
It takes vision to see that a sport can get national or even international attention by careful nurturing of the product without regard to size of market. Did anyone care that the Cleveland Cavaliers were in freaking Cleveland when LeBron played there? Did people tune out of the AFC championship game between Cincinnati and Kansas City?
I often think about just how bad MLB is at promoting itself. I watch an excessive amount of MLB Network and cannot tell you how often they lament the fact that Mike Trout doesn't get enough national exposure while hyping yet another Dodgers game set to air that night.
I have so many thoughts here.
First, nobody watches ESPN any more so what they talk about is fairly irrelevant. They average about 600,000 viewers during the day in the US.
Second, more baseball is better than less baseball. "We have to do something about all this baseball" is not an argument that makes sense to me (and thankfully given the money involved, not something that needs to be seriously entertained).
But most importantly, we are literally just a season removed from 1. four teams in the AL East winning 91 games with the Blue Jays going home, 2. the Mariners winning 90 games and going home, 3. the Mets blowing a months-long division lead with the Braves coming from behind to win the East, 4. the Cardinals going on an absurd run to win a Wild Card, and 5. the Padres collapsing down the stretch to fall completely out of contention.
If the season ended on Memorial Day last year, the Indians and A's would have been in, the Yankees out in the AL. In the NL, the Mets, Cubs, and Padres would have been in. I feel like every year we all collectively forget just how long the season is and why it is. Will be interesting to revisit this all in September.
It can also be true that sometimes seasons are just whiffs, not every season is going to be full of the drama and excitement we might want.
144 games from April to Labor Day and September playoffs.
The bigger problem isn't the schedule, but competitive balance. This has been a problem in mlb for a long time and the luxury tax has done basically nothing to fix it. Part of the reason people talk about the nfl all year long is that the average NFL fan really can delude themselves into thinking their team could make the playoffs. Whether they are in a large or small market largely doesn't matter. But in baseball there is a clear division between big and small markets which means that, despite an occasional run like the royals had in 2014-2015, small market fans know they don't have much to cheer for. Over time that really degrades fan support and enthusiasm and prevents baseball from being the national game it once was.
In 👀 ing @ Joe’s article it’s funny to see MLB writing ✍️ this today! 😂 https://www.mlb.com/news/new-look-mlb-postseason-picture-shaping-up 😂
Similar to what others have said: MLB can set their schedule, but they can't tell us what to care about. I think this "World Series or bust" mentality is harmful, throughout American sports. It makes some sense when the World Series winner actually is (often) the best team in baseball. But no one thinks that anymore, or really even claims to. The WS champ is treated more as "this year's lucky winner!" than the true best team. So in today's game it's particularly strange to only care about the World Series.
We say that the expanded playoffs cheapen the regular season, but in my opinion they cheapen the PLAYOFFS. The regular season is still intact, and still (mostly) tells us which teams are the best. Then there's a fast-paced fun tournament to cap off the season, and if your team catches fire and wins the thing, awesome! But we probably won't see the best teams play each other, and even if they do, the series have always been too short to see who is the very best.
I'm not saying that this is how the league, the media, or even the teams themselves see it, but I've slowly been moving in that direction ever since the addition of the second Wild Card. And it's great! I root for my team to make the playoffs, win the division, win 100 games, have the best record in the league. Every day contributes to (or detracts from) those goals. I'm not going to lie: it frustrates me how everyone is willing to wipe that all away once the playoffs start. I really wish that MLB would recognize good and great regular seasons by teams to the extent that they recognize good and great regular seasons by players (playoff stats don't even really count in your career totals!). I wish teams would fight all season to get out of the cellar or to beat the rival team for third in the division. But even until that happens, I still find joy in the results that I believe matter more (the regular season), rather than just the results that the culture says matter more (the playoffs).
Maybe just change the name from "World Series Winner" to "Postseason Winner."
Clapping a thousand times for this!