The trait that separates main league baseball from each different sport on earth is the sheer size of its common season. At 162 video games, the baseball season is twice so long as basketball and hockey, and 10 occasions that of NFL soccer.
For half the 12 months, baseball groups play virtually day by day. For followers, the ritual of watching video games, studying field scores, and following quotidian ups and downs of a staff makes baseball an important a part of day by day life in a method no different sport can.
Ironically, simply in the intervening time that baseball has rightly adopted rule adjustments, just like the pitch clock to carry the game again to its faster-playing roots, Major League Baseball managed the unthinkable: It made the sacred common season far much less vital. How? By stopping groups with the most effective data from taking part in any video games for per week straight initially of the playoffs, probably the most unnatural jail sentence potential for a baseball staff.
Thus, the three groups (Braves, Dodgers, Orioles) who this 12 months received 100 or extra common season video games — the traditional benchmark of an incredible staff — had been every colder than ice after the enforced weeklong layoff, collectively shedding 9 out of 10 playoff video games, and so had been shortly eradicated. Note that every 100-game winner was essentially taking part in towards groups that had simply come off profitable the earlier three sport sequence, and so had been going through groups nonetheless in season kind and taking part in properly.
Face it MLB: Keeping groups with the most effective data from taking part in baseball for per week is a big penalty, the baseball equal of jail, not a reward.
The downside is prolonged playoff schemes, which had been initially offered as simply an expedient wanted due the COVID pandemic. But grasping MLB executives and homeowners realized they might additionally squeeze in a number of further playoff video games in the event that they perpetuated a system the place six groups in every league certified. If baseball insists on six groups from every league, then two groups merely have to sit down whereas the opposite 4 play.
During its first 65 years, the World Series featured only one staff from every league with the most effective common season file. Then for the following 25 years, from 1968 to 1993, solely two groups in every league certified for the playoffs.
Now 12 groups, or greater than a 3rd of your entire MLB’s 30 groups, qualify for what’s successfully a event. Is it any shock we’ve got Arizona and Texas within the World Series this 12 months, two groups that not solely didn’t win their divisions, however completed at or close to the underside in wins of all qualifying groups.
But the present format is much more insidious than that. It encourages groups to create rosters geared only for the postseason, favoring two or three pitchers who would possibly dominate absurdly quick three-game after which five-game sequence, fairly than prizing the standard 4 or 5 pitcher rotations by requiring all seven-game playoff sequence. In quick, all that issues now could be getting within the dance, and having a few scorching pitchers and hitters.
To reestablish its id and the integrity of its common season, baseball must return to a saner postseason format. The easiest and fairest methodology would enable solely 4 groups from every league to achieve the playoffs.
This methodology was used efficiently from 1994-2011. Unfortunately after that, the so-called “expanded wild card” insanity took maintain, first permitting 5 groups in every league to qualify from 2012-2019, and now the six-headed hydra in every league. It’s a catastrophe baked into the collective bargaining settlement the gamers and homeowners reached throughout the maintain out season of 2022. So sure, the gamers are partly responsible, too.
Yet there could also be a fairer method ahead, in any case. Under the most recent labor settlement, baseball is aspiring to develop to 32 groups. With that variety of groups, the MLB may create two divisions of eight groups in every league, with the winner of every division reaching the playoffs and the extra two groups with the highest data in every league additionally qualifying. Then the division winners may host 5 of seven first spherical video games, the winners of these video games with the most effective file internet hosting 5 of seven within the league championship sequence video games, with the winners onto the World Series.
No system is ideal. But equally, the MLB can not perpetuate a system that undermines its most definitive attribute — the lengthy day by day common season — after which penalizes its greatest groups for profitable throughout that season. To achieve this is to throw out 150 years of custom. After all, they don’t seem to be known as the boys of October. They are known as the Boys of Summer.
Paul Bledsoe (X: @paulbledsoe) is an Orioles and Nationals fan from Arlington, Virginia.
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Source: www.bostonherald.com