Making Them Earn It

When I first heard about MLB's plans to add another Wild Card spot in each league, I didn't like it.  After all, I'm a traditionalist who longs to return to the days when baseball had two divisions in each league, and only the division winners were granted entrance into the postseason.  For years I've been arguing that the Wild Card and Interleague play have ruined what used to make professional baseball so unique, so it shouldn't come as any surprise that I wasn't in favor of additional playoff expansion.  As I've thought through it and listened to the arguments on either side of the debate, though, I've recently come to like the idea.  In fact, at this point I would say I'm a fan of MLB's new plan.

In recent years, we've seen Wild Card teams sneak into the playoffs on the last Sunday of the regular season and run the table through the World Series.  In fact, it's happened a lot.  Despite playing only mediocre baseball for most of the season, these teams get hot at exactly the right time, and the result is that the 162-game regular season seems "cheapened."  At first, I thought that adding another Wild Card slot would only increase this phenomenon; with another underachieving Wild Card team in the mix, we'd be more likely to have a non-division-winner representing one of the leagues (or both) in the Fall Classic.

The more I think about it, though, this seems unlikely to be the case given the way MLB is structuring the new playoff system.  In fact, the revised postseason finally rewards teams adequately for winning their divisions.  Whereas before Wild Card teams and division winners were, more or less, treated equally, now the two Wild Card teams will be forced to play each other in a one game playoff before the "real" postseason even begins.  While the division winners can take an extra day to rest and position their starting rotations for an October run, Wild Card teams will be scrambling to determine how to win the one game playoff while still preserving the possibility of upsetting a division winner in a five game LDS.  It will become much trickier for a Wild Card team to get out of the first round, especially if that team relies heavily on one or two top starters.

The new system won't be perfect, especially in its first iteration.  As many have pointed out, this year's playoffs will be a little messy because of last minute scheduling quirks, and if a one game playoff is needed after the regular season to determine the postseason participants that will really scrunch everything together.  The Huffington Post also notes that "it's unfair to teams that spent their offseason preparing for the old format," which may be a bigger concern than people realize, and it will be interesting to see if teams make in-season moves with the new format in mind.  These worries aside, I'm excited to see how the new system works out.  Any format that rewards teams for doing what they should do - winning as many games as possible during the regular season - is fine by me.