A New October for Major League Baseball
The baseball playoffs are underway and they’re as exciting and unpredictable as ever. As a Braves fan, I marveled last year as the 88 win Braves team marched through October and upset the Brewers, Dodgers and Astros on the way to win the World Series. This season the Braves won 101 games and are out after 4 games. The Braves lost to the Phillies who finished 14 games behind the Braves in the standings. The Padres just dispatched the Dodgers in 4 games after finishing 22 games behind the Dodgers during the regular season. This is certainly exciting for neutral observers or fans in Philly or San Diego. It’s true, anything can happen in the playoffs. This season the Dodgers and Mets also won over 100 games in the National League, but those clubs were unable to even advance to the National League Championship Series.
Maybe the average American sports fan wants a system where one of twelve teams will randomly win in the playoffs. That’s the novelty and excitement of the playoff system and so far the expanded playoffs appear to be a TV ratings improvement. However, there’s gotta be a better way of crowning a champion and keeping multiple fan-bases excited about baseball. In the long run, will fans eventually figure out that the baseball playoff system is basically a coin flipping exercise? Why take the regular season or playoffs seriously if it just comes down to luck every season?
The randomness of baseball’s current system isn’t just a sour grapes argument from fans of losing teams. During the NBA playoffs, the better team wins a seven game series 80% of the time. For baseball to reach the 80% threshold, two teams would have to play 75 times. Obviously this is never going to happen, but it’s a good example of why baseball playoffs results are so random. It also explains why baseball has always had a long regular season. It takes a lot of games to separate teams. When it was just the NL and AL champions playing in the World Series the best team won a lot more often.
There’s a way to make baseball purists happy and also encourage more meaningful games between more teams. The idea is borrowed from sports leagues in Europe. One of the best parts of European soccer leagues is that each club plays in multiple competitions during the season. During league play, each club plays a balanced home and away schedule. At the end of the season, the club with the best record is the champion. There’s very little argument about the champion because it’s undoubtedly the best team over the course of a long season.
This can sometimes lead to a boring end of the season, but the various knockout cups give more clubs things to play for throughout the season. In a single match knockout tournament any club can win. So there’s various things a club can win during the season. There’s one true champion, but there’s also pride in winning a cup. This is the solution to the baseball dilemma.
The first step would be to move baseball back to a 154 game balanced schedule. The the teams with the best record in the NL/AL would play in a seven game World Series. This is the old system that was replaced in 1969 and has expanded to the point where 12 teams could be crowned champions. The drawback is that most teams would be eliminated by the halfway point. That’s bad for selling tickets and it’s bad for TV revenue. That’s why a new cup system would be created to give teams multiple goals throughout the season. Starting after the trade deadline each team would participate in a knockout cup. There would be a random draw for each round. Each match up could be a 3–5 game series and the final would take place in October after the regular season. The World Series would follow the end of the cup series. One alternative would be to play a League Championship Series starting with the top two teams from each league. That would be a huge improvement over the current system. Being one of the top 4 teams is much better than crowning a team that was 12th best team during the regular season.
Purists would love the return to the classic World Series format, but they would likely hate the cup. Baseball shouldn’t be opposed to new ideas simply because some fans hate change. Is this idea worse that the current system? Why shouldn’t baseball reward teams for winning the most games during the season? Does it hurt anything to also recognize a cup winner? Leagues throughout the world have done this for decades and it hasn’t hurt their leagues.
This is far from a revolutionary new idea. The NBA is considering adding a cup during their season. No team has repeated as World Series champs in over twenty years and it’s because it’s very difficult for any team to run the playoff gauntlet in two straight seasons. If we are already crowning a champion based on random luck, why not crown a cup champion and a true World Series champion? Every season teams would compete for a pennant, a World Series, and a MLB cup. Imagine being a team to complete the double by winning the cup and the World Series. I know it’s just a dream, isn’t it pretty to think so?
