Posted on 11/17/2011 4:42:02 PM PST by SMGFan
MILWAUKEE—Major League Baseball plans to revamp its divisions and playoff format with a series of moves that will have significant ramifications for at least two of its media partners and millions of fans. MLB hopes to begin some of the changes next season, with an additional wild-card team making the playoffs in each league as part of an effort to generate more television revenue for baseball and give fans of midtier teams a reason to continue buying tickets and following games through the entire season. The four wild-card teams will play a one-game or best-of-three playoff to determine who moves on to the divisional series.
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This only adds two more games to the playoffs. However it means that winning the division becomes more important. A couple of times the past few years the Yankees and Red Sox did not kill themselves to win the division because with only one wild card, both teams were in the playoffs anyway. Now they will want to avoid the one game wild card game.
I agree on both counts, but the Players Association will never allow the DH to go away (too highly paid) and with 15 teams in a league, you have to have interleague play so everyone plays every day.
The obvious solution is to expand the rosters to 28 (with 25 dressing, taking a page from the NHL) and to add two teams. While the Players Association would lose 14 highly-paid regular DHs, they'd gain 16 new regulars, 10 new starting pitchers, 2 new closers, additional bench players, and three extra slots per team.
The other advantage is that you could break each league into four four-team divisions and you would not need to have wild cards. Division winners could fill 4 playoff slots.
Sending the Astros to the American League after half a century in the NL is DUMB, DUMB, DUMB!!!
Any system that makes non-winners eligible for the playoffs isn't good for pennant races, but the argument MLB makes is that two wild cards may actually be better for pennant races than one. By forcing the two wild-cards into a "play-in" round, it screws up their rotation and creates a greater disadvantage for being a wild card, thus encouraging teams to play for the division win rather than "a playoff spot," the argument goes.
The problem is that had this system been in place this season, the excitement we saw on the last day of the season as the Cardinals and Rays defeated the Braves and Red Sox for the wild-card spots would not have occurred, since all four teams would already have been in. So instead of an exciting, climactic night of baseball,we'd have an anticlimactic night of playing out the string as the teams prepared themselves for the wild-card play-in. But the powers that be in baseball don't see that.
Any system that makes non-winners eligible for the playoffs isn't good for pennant races, but the argument MLB makes is that two wild cards may actually be better for pennant races than one. By forcing the two wild-cards into a "play-in" round, it screws up their rotation and creates a greater disadvantage for being a wild card, thus encouraging teams to play for the division win rather than "a playoff spot," the argument goes.
The problem is that had this system been in place this season, the excitement we saw on the last day of the season as the Cardinals and Rays defeated the Braves and Red Sox for the wild-card spots would not have occurred, since all four teams would already have been in. So instead of an exciting, climactic night of baseball,we'd have an anticlimactic night of playing out the string as the teams prepared themselves for the wild-card play-in. But the powers that be in baseball don't see that.
You are right about 2011, but all the planets had to line up for last years race to occur. If you factor in the other years’ races, then this new system might make sense.
So, you find it interesting when the pitcher comes to bat and is almost an automatic out.
16 out of 30 is nowhere near 80 percent.
The days of 16 out of 21 were 20 years ago. You need to update your references.
Exceedingly so.
Let's say he has a three hitter going but his team is behind 1-0. Two outs, runner on second and the bullpen was used the night before in a 15 inning game.
What do you do?
In the American League....who cares?
Freeper reaction seems negative.
But I like all around.
I love interleauge play. There are too many division games in my opinion, boring.
I like the extra playoffs teams too. Better chance a team I like will make the playoffs is the way I see it. 1 game playoff for the wild cards would be best, would only add a day to the schedule. It would be exciting and make teams do more to earn that wild card spot, rewards the division winners more.
Of course this is bad for the the Cubs and the other NL central teams who won’t have the ‘stros to kick around 18 times a year.
I think this is one of the worst moves that MLB could make. First, adding a second Wild Card team to the play-offs just increases the NHLization of the MLN play-offs. What’s next, 8 teams per league making the post-season? The baseball regular season is supposed to mean something.
But making things even worse is the one-game play-off between the two Wild Card teams. That is just beyond idiotic. Perhaps the biggest complaint about the current post-season is that the Division Series is best-of-5 instead of best-of-7, making luck a bigger factor. Well, a one-game play-off is an absolute crapshoot. And while one-game play-offs have been used in baseball for decades (in the AL since at least 1948), they had heretofore been an additional regular-season game between two teams that had finished the regular schedule with identical records, so one-game play-offs were used in baseball in situations in which other sports wouldn’t even play a game and decide things through some sort of tiebreaker (such as head-to-head record or, in extreme cases, a coin flip). But here the one-game “tiebreaker” will be played by teams that didn’t finish the season with the same record; in fact, it could be played by a team with 100 wins versus a team with 89 wins. Some “tie”!
Remember those incredible last few days of the season last year, with the Cardinals and Rays mounting furious comebacks and the Braves and Red Sox collapsing,culminating in that otherwordly final day in which the Cardinals and Rays won and the Braves and Red Sox lost (with 3 of the games being absolute nailbiters) to cap two incredible reversals of fortune? Well, if the new rules had been in effect last year, all four teams would have been guaranteed a trip to a one-game play-off with around 4 games to go and would have been resting regulars and setting up their post-season pitching rotation. All excitement would be gone.
The Wild Card’s introduction in 1994 eliminated the possibility of a great pennant race between two outstanding teams in which the winner made the play-offs and the loser went home—the last real pennant race between great teams was the 1993 NL West race between the Braves and the Giants, where the Braves mounted a late-season comeback and won the final game of the regular season to finish with 104 wins, and the Giants lost the final game to finish with 103 games and fail to make the post-season. With the Wild Card, the loser would always have something to fall back upon, and what could have been classic pennant races between the Red Sox and Yankees became afterthoughts, since both teams would make the play-offs irrespective of who won. Now we won’t even have good Wild Card races.
Baseball should not be about giving losing teams consolation prizes.
As for moving the Astros to the AL West, I think it’s a slap of the face to tradition, and there now will be two Central Time Zone teams playing in the same division with three Pacific Time Zone teams, making game times inconvenient for one set of fans. And there will now be interleague games all year long, making such games less “special.” I don’t have a problem with that aspect of it if having each league have three divisions of five teams each means that we go back to the pre-1994 schedules in which teams within a division played the same exact schedule (instead of one team in a division getting to play the Orioles 6 times and the Yankees none while the other has the opposite schedule), but I doubt that MLB will even take that into account.
You might want to check overall record the past 10 or even 20 years before making that comment. Check the flubs record versus ours.
Yep, as an Astros fan, I sure am looking forward to watching 75% of divisional road games at 9:00 p.m. /s
Or 10:00 p.m. in many cases.
This would make baseball similar to the NFL -- 4 rounds of playoffs to pick the champion. The NFL has 32 total teams and 12 (38%) of them make the playoffs. Under this plan, there would be 29 total MLB teams and 10 of them (34%) would make the playoffs.
The only problem for baseball would be extending the season into November. I think they need to stop the inter league play, schedule a few double headers, and end the regular season a week earlier than now to accommodate this extra playoff round.
Well, how many situations like that come up? A 15-inning game and no one available in the bullpen. Really now.
In any event, I want a player in the batters box who has a prayer of getting a hit in any tight situation.
You apparently don’t. So we just flat disagree, friend.
The other problem here is that the second wild card diminishes the July 31 non-waiver trade deadline.
At the deadline, teams that are out of the race build for the future by dumping veterans on contenders for younger players and the contenders go out and get that one more veteran player who can help them over the hump.
With two wild cards, many more teams will think they’re in contention, so there will be fewer moves made at the deadline.
I agree with both ideas. They’re bad for baseball.
And go back to rotating home field for the World Series, not depending on the All-Star Game.
I think you meant 154. And/or bring back Sunday doubleheaders.
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