Playoff baseball man. It’s arguably the greatest thing the good ol’ USA has ever created since A1 Steak Sauce during the Civil War. Its why cavemen painted on walls and discovered fire. With a hope that someday, their ancestors can experience October baseball…but is it perfect? Is it currently in fact, broken? Is there a perfect format at all? No matter what the format has been, baseball has thrived, and even if there were no postseason altogether, it would still be the game we’d be addicted to, but one has to wonder if the format we have now, is in fact, necessary.
For the majority from the creation of baseball to 1969, nearly a hundred years, there was just the World Series, and it was a largely uncontested format. With the regular seasons being as long as they were and are, it was enough time to decide and seperate the two best teams in the sport. The main reason why that original format changed wasn’t because of a general detest or that it had gone stale, but because of MLB expanding and including more clubs. As a result, the league felt it was right, and only fair, to add an extra round before the World Series itself (the League Championship Series) to give the field a greater chance of competing for a title. in 1994 during the leagues realignment of divisions (and further expansion of the league), they included another round prior to the LCS, what is now the League Division Series, as well as the introduction of the wild card spot. In 2012, they added yet another round in the form of a one game playoff between two wild card spots.
So that’s a very brief history of it, but is it too much? Half of me says “hell no, more baseball the better”, the other half says “how much baseball do you need to truly declare a season winner?”. Growing up watching the intensity of some LDS and LCS’s, why would you want to change anything about them? some of the best games I’ve ever watched were LCS’s. We don’t have the legendary Red Sox/Yankees encounters without them. It definitely wasn’t a mistake by the league.
Have there been mistakes involving changes to the playoff format though? Personally, the one game playoff between two wild card teams we currently have is absolutely dreadful. Not only was it unnecessary at the time to implement, there wasn’t a demand for it, and to be a player heading into Spring Training, and knowing you’re about to go on a 162 game trek, only to know in the back of your mind it could all in a way essentially be cancelled out with just one game at the end. No player or coach wants to play in it. Provides for great parody, but overall just an awful idea.
Is 162 games enough to distinguish the two best teams in the league? One would think so. Do LCS’s and/or LDS’s pitting baseball’s best teams of the season against each other in order to declare a true winner make for great moments and lifelong bragging rights? Of course. I personally wouldn’t be against going back to the original World Series only format, providing we’d probably have to eliminate divisions and just have the two leagues or conferences again. There’s something about the pureness of a World Series only system that I find asthetic, and although it would never happen because of all the money missed out from not having more playoff games, it follows tradition and the games originality. If we are to keep the LCS/LDS system, I’d be just as happy with it, my only change to them would be to make both of the a 7 game series instead of 5, also because of the traditional feel of it.
But please, Rob Manfred, for the sake of Abner Doubleday and Mr. Cartwright and baseball’s forefathers, for all of us, abandon the one game playoff Wild Card game. Get rid of it completely. We might even forgive you if you do.
