Baseball wants to give back eight games a year and I’d take that deal before they finish the sentence. The playoff part of the pitch, though, is where they lose me.
Here’s what MLB put in front of the players union today: a 154-game regular season starting in 2029, a best-of-seven Division Series, and a setup where higher seeds get to pick their playoff opponents. The American League played 154 games from 1920 to 1961, and nobody back then thought the sport was too short. A weekly off day sounds great to me, and the union has asked for a shorter schedule before, so that part might actually get done.
The catch is that MLB tied every piece of it to a salary cap, and the players have said flatly that they won’t take one. The current labor deal runs out at 11:59 p.m. Eastern on December 1. I wrote about that fight a few weeks back, so I’ll skip the sequel. The point is that a lot of this may never get past the bargaining table.
Now the playoffs. Today, six teams per league get in, and only the top two division winners skip the wild card round. The third division winner, the one who won a division and still has to play, gets treated like a wild card. MLB’s fix is to let that team pick its opponent. That’s a prize for a team that was fine, not good.
Here’s mine. Add a fourth wild card, which I normally hate, because it buys something I want more. Every division winner gets a bye. Seven teams per league, three of them resting while the four wild cards fight it out. The top wild card plays the fourth in one game, the second plays the third in one game, and the two survivors play a best-of-three. Whoever comes out of that faces the top seed in the Division Series.
I know, it’s a lot of baseball for teams that didn’t win anything. That’s the idea. If you finished first in a division across a long season, you shouldn’t be sitting at home on October 1 wondering which of the teams that finished second gets to be your problem. You should be sitting at home because you earned the right to sit at home.
And yes, I know one-game rounds are brutal. A team that won 95 games can lose to a hot pitcher on a random Tuesday. But that’s the price of the wild card. If you couldn’t beat the club in your own division over six months, you don’t get a series. You get a coin flip with better odds than you deserve.
MLB’s version rewards the best record in the league with a choice of victims, which is cute and will make for good television. Mine rewards the division title itself. Win your division and the worst thing you face is a rested bullpen and a long weekend.
Playing 154 instead of 162 only makes sense if the games that remain mean more. Right now the division title is closer to a participation ribbon than a prize. Make it the prize.
That’s my two cents: if the division winner doesn’t get a real edge, why are we bothering to play 154 games?
Photo by Ken Lund via Openverse, licensed CC BY-SA.