Every time the MLB Postseason rolls along, people start talking about ways to improve it (as if it really needs to be tweaked anymore). But the amount of teams to make the Postseason has increased by 150% over the last 20 years, and if that pace holds (which I doubt it will), we’re looking at just about half the league making the playoffs in the year 2034. In other words, MLB would be just like the NBA and NHL.
Anyway, I was thinking about what this year’s MLB Postseason, which has been so exciting and unpredictable, would look like if it took the format of other sports. I had to take some creative license here based on not wanting to realign divisions, but overall, things look pretty interesting compared to the matchups we got this year.
English Premier League.
We’ll start with an easy one – the Premier League doesn’t have playoffs. Whichever club finishes with the most points at the top of the table is declared champion. Congratulations, Angels!
There’s also this thing in the Premier League called relegation, in which the worst three teams in the league get bumped down to a lower league. Apologies to the Diamondbacks, Rockies, and Rangers, but you guys would have spent 2015 kicking it in AAA if baseball was like European soccer.
National Football League.
In the NFL, the four division winners in each conference are seeded 1-4 based on record, with the other two playoff spots going to the non-division winners with the best record. Since MLB only has three divisions per league, we’ll go with the old NFL playoff format of three division winners and three wild cards per conference.
In the American League, the Angels would be the top seed, the Orioles would be the second seed, and the Tigers would be the third seed. Los Angeles and Baltimore would earn byes to start, Detroit would be matched up with the sixth-seeded Seattle Mariners, while the Royals and Athletics would be seeded fourth and fifth, respectively. Hm…interesting.
Over in the National League, the Nationals and Dodgers would earn the top two seeds and byes, while the Cardinals would take the third seed and host the NL’s sixth-seed – the Milwaukee Brewers. Pittsburgh and San Francisco would be seeded fourth and fifth, and would battle just like they did this October.
Not a lot changes in the NFL’s seeding format – the third division winner just has to play extra games, while the top two seeds in each league get a breathe. That would actually be kind of cool – four three-game series that start on Tuesday, with the third game on Thursday only coming in case of a split of the first two games. Then, the Division Series matchups would start that Friday. If you want to give the division winners a huge competitive advantage, this would be the way.
National Basketball Association.
The NBA has a format similar to the NFL…only a little more extreme. There are three division leaders in each conference seeded 1-3, and five Wild Cards seeded 4-8. Needless to say, this would create an absolute mess in baseball.
The six top American League seeds would be the same as in the NFL scenario above, with the seventh and eighth seeds going to the Indians and dammit, the Yankees. The Angels and Yankees, Orioles and Indians, Tigers and Mariners, and Royals and Athletics would all face off in the first round. Man – the Orioles would really get screwed over here. Cleveland was on a roll at the end of the year before running out of gas, and they’d be a brutal matchup for anyone, especially in a short series.
Like the American League, the National League’s top six teams would be the same as in the NFL layout above. But we’d also get the unfortunate additions of two sub-.500 teams to the NL bracket – the Mets and Braves. Washington would take on Atlanta, the Dodgers would battle the Mets, the Cardinals and Brewers would face off, and the Pirates and Giants would once again go toe to toe. Man, talk about rewarding mediocrity – imagine if the Braves, who finished 17 games behind the Nationals in the NL East this year, managed to dispatch them in a short series. The purists would be irate.
NCAA Football.
Ah yes, the brand new COLLEGE FOOTBALL PLAYOFF, which is going to generate plenty of headaches compared to the BCS. Since the four teams are completely arbitrarily picked and seeded by “the committee”, I’m just going to go ahead and choose the teams with the four best records – the Orioles, Angels, Nationals, and Dodgers – and pit each league’s elite teams against each other. Fair enough.
NCAA Basketball.
MOARRRRR BRACKETS! Since we only have 30 MLB teams, we’re going to give the two teams with the best records a bye in the first round – congratulations, Angels and Nationals! From there on out, we’ll do the whole “good record vs bad record” seeding layout the rest of the way. This would suck for baseball. We’d see riveting matchups like Diamondbacks-Orioles, Rockies–Dodgers, Rangers-Tigers, and Twins-Cardinals in the first round, with the rest of the bracket being filled out with even more mediocre matchups. Based on random chance, we could end up with a World Series pitting two sub-.500 teams against each other.
One other way to do it would be put each league on opposite sides of the bracket so we could get a traditional AL vs NL matchup in the World Series. But still, that would give us Orioles-Rangers, Tigers-Twins, Royals-Astros, Dodgers-Diamondbacks, Cardinals-Rockies, and Pirates-Cubs in the first round. Yeah, not exactly thrilling.
National Hockey League.
The NHL just introduced a new playoff format last season, and naturally, it’s still taking awhile to catch on. Their format is confusing – the top three teams from each of four divisions qualifies for the playoffs, along with two Wild Cards from each conference. This leads to a situation where the second and third place teams from each division face off, while the division winners takes on the Wild Cards, and the division winner with the better record takes on the worse of the two Wild Card teams. Got it? Great.
Of course, the NHL only has four divisions compared to MLB’s six, and we can’t really go back to the pre-1993 divisional formats because of how drastic the realignment was. The playoffs would end up looking a lot like the NBA format, however, with only a couple of changes in the middle.
Major League Soccer.
Yes, MLS is still a thing, and their playoff format is actually kind of similar to baseball’s. There are no divisions in MLS, just two conferences. The top five teams in each conference make the playoffs, with the fourth and fifth seeds battling in a “knockout” game to advance to a match against the top seed. So…we’d wind up with the exact same matchups as we did in MLB this year. SUCCESS!
All in all, I think baseball has a pretty good thing going on. This year, two Wild Card teams are facing off in the World Series – that’s pretty cool, and something that wouldn’t have happened back in 1993. At the same time, the league can’t risk their playoffs getting too bloated like the NBA and NHL – those leagues tend to have their playoffs drag on for two long months, pushing the league’s season to a miserable nine months. For as much as I love baseball, I couldn’t deal with meaningful games going on for nine months. That would stretch the season from the beginning of March until the end of November, and the nation’s attention would be gone in that time.
If the league decided to make any changes to their playoff format going forward, I’d offer one of two suggestions. The first would be to turn the Wild Card matchup into a three game series as opposed to a one game, winner take all affair – it would give the division winners more of a benefit, and would effectively put the Wild Card teams at a disadvantage that clearly wasn’t evident this year.
The second suggestion? Add one more Wild Card team, and go with that NFL-style format I proposed earlier. Two three-game series in each league between seeds three through six, while the top two teams get a bye. But when you up the total playoff teams in the league to 12, you run dangerously close to diluting the pool a little too much. An 87 win Mariners team getting in? Fine. An 82 win Brewers team? Eh….not so much.
We’re in a good place, baseball. Let’s not screw it up too much trying to be like other sports.
