We know the new baseball playoff system, with the addition of a third wildcard team, is going to create quirks. In a vacuum, it works because all winners in division are considered equal. But in fact, in places where people play games, they very much are not. It is difficult to judge teams based on their performance alone, because each leaderboard winner plays on a different schedule (something that will be partially adjusted next season with a more balanced schedule). more equal). But the idea is that if you’re the last wildcard team, your “punishment” is that you have to play against the third best team in the league, along the way.
It didn’t really go that way this season.
Rob Mains of Baseball Prospectus and Joe Sheehan in his newsletter talked about this a bit, but in both tournaments it seemed like it would be better to end up in the last wildcard position than in the wildcard position. second aspect. And that’s because MLB doesn’t continue after the wilds – something they might want to look into after this season.
In the American League, the Blue Jays, Mariners and Rays were all separated by half-time and hit 5.5 points ahead of the Orioles. Thanks to the Yankees actually being resuscitated and sober for a couple of games this weekend against Tampa, those three will almost certainly be your wildcard team, unless some kind of historic collapse will bring Follow Epstein back wear a gorilla costume.
The oddity of the AL is that the sixth seed might have an easier path to making some serious noise. That seed will play the winner in AL Central, be it the White Sox or the Guardians, both of whom are headed for 85 or 86 seasons, maybe. Meanwhile, the remaining two wildcard teams will play against each other, both of whom are on pace for 90+ seasons.
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Now you can go into the weeds here, and really debate whether laning for up to three games and having to watch Dylan shut down for one of them and the terrifyingly consistent Johnny Cueto or Is a resurrected Lance Lynn a good match? Ditto when it comes to witnessing Shane Bieber and Cleveland’s cowshed, it’s darkness for belated neighbors. But it also doesn’t have to face Tampa’s employees, or Toronto’s lineup if it gets hot, and Seattle has Luis Castillo and Logan Gilbert and Robbie Ray also waiting. Any team can be anything after just three games, but we have 162 games of proof that both Cleveland and Chicago have some pretty big flaws.
If the final seed in the knockouts can get past the AL Central winner, which isn’t a magical result, then they’ll face the Yankees instead of the Astros. Now, the real Yankees aren’t the crash test dummies they’ve been posing for a few months now. Or at least they shouldn’t be. But it’s a squad with lots of holes, and a hurt, bad pitcher who throws more innings than ever, or Gerrit Cole, whatever that means to you. And they could still win 100 games in a division that would make two more playoff teams and a third team that would be the first to miss (Baltimore). But they are not the Astros. Finishing Friday could see a team get an easier match in the Split as well as the first round, if they get there.
In NL, it’s like a story. The third wildcard team will face St. Louis Cardinals, the winners of the three-legged and four-horse race were NL Central. Yeah, yeah “The Cardinals’ Devilish Magic,” will only be upgraded to MacBeth level with Pujols and Molina in their last season. But the cards are definitely not the Mets or the Braves, which is what the 5th seed – the better team than the 6th seed – will get as their “reward”. And will the 6th seed topple St. Louis In St. Louis (be my heart), then they don’t draw Dodgers. Sure, the Mets or Braves, whichever team wins the NL East, aren’t the field team, but the Dodgers are the best team in the league.
Again, you can walk into the weeds here, take a glance, and see that with the supple health of the Dodgers and Craig Kimbrel employees always waiting to go Three Mile Island in the pen, perhaps face to face with they have nothing to fear more than having to face deGrom and Scherzer three times in a series of five games. But we play game 162 to determine who is better, and according to the record posted for six months, the sixth seed ends up being the easier path.
And most seasons will be like this. There is always one element that comes after the other two, this will always apply to the third group of wildcards. There is always a tournament with two of the strongest teams in the tournament, and the team that doesn’t win the tournament will be a much tougher opponent than any team that wins the tutoring. Last year’s Dodgers, 2019 Nationals, Cubs and 2018 Yankees were all teams that didn’t win a tournament better during the season than the wildcard teams on some point. It only works when you divide it into six parts.
The only real answer is to eliminate the split, balance the schedule altogether and get rid of the top six, which is never going to happen. Sending it back after the wildcard round is half the solution. Picking the lowest tier winner and three wildcards after the regular season is another solution, but any tier winning team will be extremely keen on having to travel to play against the team. do not have. And again, because the schedule is so different between teams in other divisions, it’s not entirely fair.
We can go back and laugh at this when it ends up being a Cardinals-White Sox World Series and I have to move to the moon.
