The Booth Review - MLB Possibly Adding Two Wildcard Teams
It looks like baseball is going to be adding two playoff teams starting next season. Both the players’ union and owners seem to be in agreement with this, which leaves three questions:
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| picture from wired.com |
Will this change be good for baseball?
In my opinion, adding 2 more playoff teams will be a great change for baseball. In case you don’t already know, there are two leagues in baseball, with three divisions in each league. Every division winner gets a playoff spot and each league gets one wildcard. In 2012, there may be another wildcard spot added to both leagues, changing the number of teams that make the playoffs from 8 to 10. The rest of the four major sports have more playoff teams than baseball. Hockey and basketball have 16 playoff teams each and the NFL has 12. More playoff teams means that more fans are invested in the postseason. Baseball will now have two more fan bases that are excited for baseball in October.
This change will also make the regular season more exciting. These two postseason spots will add more teams to the playoff mix at the end of September meaning more teams will be invested at the end of the season. Less teams will be trading their best players off, less teams will shut down there young pitchers for the year, and more teams will be fighting for the playoffs. What isn’t great about that?
A great example of how this change will help baseball is the 2008 season. In 2008 the Angels, Rays, Red Sox, and White Sox made the playoffs. They had 100, 97, 95, and 89 wins, respectively. The Yankees has 89 wins that season and lost the playoff race by 6 games. That means that even though the Yankees had the same amount of wins as the White Sox, they were out of the playoffs a week before the end of the season. It you add another wildcard team for the American League that season, the Yankees, the Twins (88 wins), and the Blue Jays (86 wins) would have been fighting for that last spot. The Twins were in the division race anyways, but the Blue Jays and Yankees were done before the last week of baseball started. Adding this playoff spot would have kept these teams in the hunt until the end of the season making baseball more exciting.
Will adding two playoff teams take away from the importance of the regular season?
Some people argue that adding two wildcard teams will make the regular season less important and I couldn’t disagree more. I think it will make the regular season even more important. Right now, each league has four playoff spots. The only advantage the 1 seed has over the wildcard is home field advantage. That isn’t much of an advantage considering there are 162 games in a season. Team A could have 110 wins, Team B could have 80 wins, and they will have the same chances of making the World Series, other than home field advantage. By adding another wildcard spot, teams that win the division will have a first round bye and will be able to rest their players.
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| picture from pennlive.com |
In the past, there have been times when two teams from the same division clinched playoff spots early. Rather than fighting for the division and top seed, they decided to rest their players because the difference between the wildcard and division winner wasn’t that drastic of a difference. Adding a wildcard playoff game will make winning the division very important. Now those two teams will be competing until the end of the season fighting to stay out of the play-in game.
Should the wildcard round be a one game elimination or a best-of-3 series?
Nothing in sports is more exciting than a single elimination game; winner moves on, loser goes home. Some of the best baseball games in the past couple of years have been the play-in games to make the playoffs. If baseball decided to go with the one game elimination approach, people will realize that the wildcard games are the most exciting games of the playoffs every year.
In the end, I think adding two wildcard teams to the playoffs is a great decision by Major League Baseball. And making it a single elimination game would bring even more excitement to the sport.
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