It's pennant race time in baseball. I know these days a large portion of the country's sports fans are much more concerned with pre-season football than baseball. Call me old-fashioned, but give me late August baseball over late August football any day. I mean, I love football too, and I can't wait for opening weekend. But the games don't even count yet.
Anyone who follows baseball from year to year will tell you that this year is shaping for a particularly compelling stretch run. All but 2 division races are still very much up for grabs. As I write this, all 5 teams in the National League East are still within striking distance of the division crown, all within 6.5 games of the first place Braves. In the American League, 5 teams are within 5 games of the wild card, and in the NL, 5 teams are within 3 games. Barring a major run by a few different teams, this season promises to provide games loaded with playoff implication down to the very end. There is a lot to get excited about in baseball right now.
And yet, one fact really agitates me - the cespool that is the NL West, and the potential it has to completely undermine the credibility of the playoffs in baseball. At this moment, the San Diego Padres sit atop the division with a 4 game lead and a record of 61 wins and 62 losses. That's right, if the season ended today, there would be a team in the playoffs that lost more games than they have won. The Padres would be 5 games back in the wild card standings if they weren't leading their division.
Matters get even worse when you look beyond the record itself. Consider the fact that MLB uses an unbalanced schedule, meaning that almost one half of a team's games come against the other teams in it's division. The West is easily the worst division in the National League. The four teams other than San Diego have four of the six worst records in the league. Only 1 NL team has failed to win more games against the West teams than they have lost. (Oddly enough, the East leading Braves) And in 44 games against those teams, the Padres are 24-20. Four games over .500 against the worst competition out there? Are you kidding me? Put the Padres in the East and they'd struggle to stay within 15 games of the .500 mark.
And so I ask: Shouldn't a playoff team win at least half of their games? I generally support the current playoff system, and don't normally have qualms about giving division winners a pass into the playoffs. I can't remember ever once balking at sending a division winner to the playoffs while a team with a better record stays home, but even I have my limits. I know teams have been making the NBA and NHL playoffs with fewer wins than losses for years, but this is baseball, and only four teams from each league make the playoffs. In my book, that means the standards should be higher.
The fact that playoff baseball is dramatically different from regular season baseball only strengthens my position. A basketball or hockey team that squeaks into the playoffs still has to go out there and win with the exact same team that got them there. Not so in baseball. Once in the playoffs, a baseball team gets to dump it's worst (and in many cases it's 2nd worst) starting pitcher. They get more frequent off days so they can make more extensive use of their best relievers. Unlike the other major sports, a baseball team can be significantly better suited for the playoffs than for the regular season. So, if you want to maintain the importance of a 162 game regular season that occupies 6 of the 7 months of the baseball season, you have to require teams to earn their playoff spots. I think at a minimum that should include a requirement of winning at least half of your games.
So, keep the divisional system, let the division winners go under normal circumstances. But if you end the season below .500, you forfeit your spot and that league awards a 2nd wild card. At the very least, give the team that finished 2nd in the wild card standings a 1 game playoff for the spot. I really don't think that's too much to ask for. San Diego could make the argument moot for this year by beating up on the West teams enough over the last month of the season to end over .500, but if the system isn't changed, that would only be dodging an inevitable bullet. Perhaps the only benefit of the 1994 strike was that it saved baseball from this embarrasment in the first year of the current playoff system, as Texas was leading the West despite being 10 games below .500 when the strike hit.
1 month ago