Bernstein: There's No Perfect Solution To MLB Playoff Unfairness
By Dan Bernstein--
CBSChicago.com senior columnist
(CBS) Six months of success, six months of optimism and excitement, in all that time, proving over 162 games just how good a team you are, and then it all comes down to the same essential chances as a flip of a coin.
Congratulations, now go home.
The awarding of extra spots in MLB's postseason tournament was an inevitability, seeing how expanded playoffs have helped other top professional leagues, both by augmenting television inventory and keeping more cities interested and invested longer in the year. But the primary consequence has been an increase in the mathematical randomness of determining the World Series champion, an ironic twist for the most statistically understood of our major sports.
To be sure, no format could possibly account for the variance inherent in a smaller grouping of games, be it five or even seven. Great teams have bad weeks, terrible teams have great weeks. And any team earning a chance to continue playing has about the same opportunity as anyone else to win it all.
Still, this one-game wild-card showdown -- which began in 2012 -- remains especially tough to swallow, especially for the Pirates and the Cubs. Here are two teams set to contend — the former looking at a third consecutive year in the wild-card round already and the latter having arrived at the open window of its designed competitive phase a year early, perhaps. Both are pushing against the divisional hegemony of the Cardinals, who seem to stay atop the National League Central regardless of their players.
Pirates general manager Neal Huntington is dealing with this now, even going so far as to admit ruing his support for the rule change, telling reporters in July, "I'm not sure there is a vote that I've had as a general manager that I regret more than the vote for the second wild card."
It's easier for him to say after the fact, of course, because his team would have found itself in the divisional round pursuant to the previous format.
Credit Cubs president Theo Epstein, then, who recently mentioned to the Chicago Tribune that he floated an alternative plan "a few years ago" that was initially rejected but may have new life with a more progressive new MLB commissioner in Rob Manfred. Epstein proposed a best-of-three arrangement with a doubleheader on the first day, understanding the time pressure.
Indeed, baseball faces weather issues in a way that other sports don't, and pushing playoffs deeper into autumnal chill is nobody's desire. No league has ever chosen to truncate its slate of regular-season games to accommodate such things, even if Cubs manager Joe Maddon says it would be fine with him.
"The season is long," Maddon said on 670 The Score. "I have never been opposed to 162, but I would not be surprised if there were something done to shorten it up a bit."
I would, due to the loss in guaranteed revenue. Yet Maddon and others have long been discussing other scheduling permutations to make this all work better. One idea involves rearranging or dissolving antiquated divisional alignments and/or how they connect to guaranteed playoff seeding — something just adopted by the NBA to make regular-season record matter more. Another proposal does away with currently unbalanced scheduling, a move likely to be fought by the union due to increases in team travel.
Proponents of the current arrangement argue that it incentivizes teams to try to win the division. But that assumes that they otherwise were not — a silly abstract concept in which a GM and manager could conceivably have such finite control as to target a particular lesser win total and hit it. All this has done is give an 85-win division champion a better shot at a title than a 95-win wild-card entrant that has to survive a winner-take-all showdown.
As baseball's collective bargaining agreement is set to expire on Dec. 1, 2016, now is the time to solicit all kinds of good ideas to synthesize something better than this.
"We'll see," Epstein said. "Not just kissing up here, but the commissioner and his people have a really good feel for how to appeal to TV, and also what's fair, what respects the integrity of the regular season. And they're open-minded, so I would expect that it evolves over the years."
Dan Bernstein is a co-host of 670 The Score's "Boers and Bernstein Show" in afternoon drive. Follow him on Twitter @dan_bernstein and read more of his columns here.