Wildcards, Tiebreakers & Playoffs: Fixing Baseball, Part 2

In Part 1, I made the argument for divisional re-alignment. But now that we have the divisions sorted out, what happens to the post-season? We cut down to 4 divisions, what happens to the other teams that are trying to get into the playoffs but don't win their division, currently covered by the wildcard? Read on.

The new alignment will leave us with 4 division winners, two in each league. Obviously, each of those teams will make the playoffs. As far as wild cards go, there would be 2 wild cards from each league, but instead of picking one from each division, it will just be the next 2 best teams, regardless of their division. Since scheduling is no longer unbalanced, all teams in the league have the same opponents (adjusted, as described in Part 1), so there is no need to pick a wildcard from each division to ensure fairness.

Because you've got more teams fighting for 2 spots, there is likely a greater chance of teams ending up with identical records and requiring a tiebreak. Season series will be used to determine things like home field advantage and playoff seeding, but if there is a tie for the final spot, a play-in game will be required. Now this may not be the best way to determine the best team, since a 1 game sample will always be inferior to a larger body of work, but it is an exciting circumstance and draws fans to the game which can only be a good thing. Also, if the two teams are evenly matched so as to have the same record, I'm sure neither team would feel slighted by being forced to play game 163 instead of looking at their head to head record during the regular season.

Playoff-wise, we're getting rid of the inane rule that the All-Star game determines home field advantage in the World Series. Like every other sport in the world, regular season performance will determine home field advantage in every series (difficult concept, no?), by the way of playoff seeding. *The caveat to this is that the divisional winners will be seeded 1 and 2, regardless of whether or not there is a wild card winner with more wins than the 2 seed.

In a perfect world, all the playoff rounds would be 7 game series. Not because they are better at truly determining the better team, but because it is more interesting if there are more games to play. To fit them all in by the end of October, all the extra off days will be cut. (The TV networks will love this idea, I'm sure...) Not only will this condense the games, but it will also force teams to use all of their pitching staffs, there won't be a favorable series format to pick for teams with only 2 good starters. I think we'd see more series going to 6 and 7 games if this were the case, and those are far more exciting.

In the end, is it a perfect setup? Probably not, and I'm sure someone could come and poke holes in it if they chose. But I think you'd be hard pressed to argue it isn't a whole lot better than what we currently have.