It provides opportunities for high-stakes, meaningful playoff games without interfering with how the championship is awarded.Nobody cares about the difference between being decent and mediocre in the current system, but if playing too poorly means that your team is eliminated from title contention next year, the finer differences matter-so besides the race for the championship, there are relegation and promotion “pennant” races as well. It dramatically complicates tanking and keeps things interesting and competitive for teams that aren’t within a reasonable distance of the championship.As we’ll see, it permits a reasonably straightforward system where each team plays a balanced schedule.Promotion and RelegationĮach year, the bottom two or three teams in the top conference will be moved to the bottom conference, and the top two or three teams in the bottom conference will be moved to the top conference. The team in each division with the best record in those 20 games advances to the playoffs, along with up to two other teams the playoffs winner will win a separate title (analogous to the FA Cup in English soccer).Each team will play an extra 20 games scattered throughout the course of the year against its current divisional rivals (regardless of which conference they are in).The team with the best record in the top conference over those 143 games will be the champion for the year.Each team will play every other team in the league in a way that yields an approximately balanced 143-game schedule.Teams will be split into a top conference and bottom conference, each with 15 teams, and use promotion and relegation to move between the two (we’ll use conference to refer to these, since division and league already have meanings in baseball).While I think this system has some clear advantages over the current one, reasonable people can certainly disagree about what level of change is necessary (if any). I should be clear that the relative merits of systems are largely matters of taste and preference. For this reason, I ruled out expansion, contraction and substantial changes in the length of the season or the structure of individual games. While this departs pretty substantially from the current system, I did my best to make it practical and something that MLB could conceivably do in the near future. What follows is my proposal for a third option that preserves most of the things to like about the current system while also making the championship a bit more meritocratic-and mitigating a couple of other issues to boot. Thus, any schedule proposal that gets rid of playoffs altogether would be not only unworkable from a business perspective but also probably makes things worse for the fans. Just to name a few, they increase fan engagement (leading to more ratings and more dollars), build a community by having everyone focusing on the same games, and give us the opportunity to watch a different form of baseball, one featuring aggressive tactics, more opportunities for stars, and greater specialization. However, even disregarding the practical issues with a perfectly balanced schedule in baseball, having a designated set of high leverage games is good for the league and fans for a variety of reasons. The team that plays the best over the course of the season gets the trophy. The fairest way of resolving this would be to have a perfectly balanced schedule and a single regular season champion (as is done in European soccer). Ultimately, though, no adjustment is going to handle the central conflict baseball faces in this regard: Short postseason series don’t necessarily reward the best teams, and so any system that relies on short series is going to lead to unsatisfying outcomes (from a competitive fairness perspective). Even going back before divisional play some of the results seem cosmically unjust, like Cleveland winning 111 games in 1954, getting swept by the Giants, and not making it back to the postseason for 50 years.īaseball occasionally adjusts to try to make things more fair, conspicuously making all divisions five teams following the 2012 season. This didn’t start with the second wild card, or the wild card in general-when there were only two divisions per league, much weaker teams could sneak into the playoffs and win the World Series (as happened with the Twins in 1987). Nearly every year, people observe the unfairness of it all-the teams that make the playoffs aren’t always the ones that deserve it the most, and the less deserving teams have a nasty habit of doing pretty well once they get to October. (via Laura)Įvery year, the baseball playoffs roll around. Under this proposal, the 2006 Cardinals wouldn’t have made it to Shea Stadium for the NLCS.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |