Reformatting the Postseason

[logan82]

2 divisions with 2 wild card teams would be pretty good. That way you end up with the 4 best teams. Gives teams like Baltimore and Tampa Bay a better chance.

[sbrylski]

2 divisions with 2 wild card teams would be pretty good. That way you end up with the 4 best teams.

No you don't. You get the best team and three other teams that might be the next best three or might have benefited from unbalanced schedules.

 

One of the division winners is the best team in the entire league. The other division winner is not guaranteed to be better than any of the teams in the other division. You can see this occasionally in the current setup. One of the divisional winners is usually not better than the wildcard, and if you dig through the past standings you can usually make a case for the wildcard runner up as better too. I don't like the wildcard because directly comparing teams with unbalanced schedules isn't fair.

 

I may have just changed my own mind on the less divisions but keeping the wildcards. I'd rather have as many divisions as playoff teams and no wildcards, so at least we know that each team not in the playoffs is worse than at least one team in the playoffs, that team that won their division. So once the MLB finds markets capable of supporting two more teams, I would vote rather for four divisions of four teams in each league as my practical suggestion for improving the fairness of the postseason.

 

(Btw, I'm getting to the point where I'll start shutting up and let the disagreements fall where they may.)

[logan82]

No matter how you format it you are going to get teams that don't belong get in and teams left out that should get a chance. The fact that teams can easily win 5+ games fewer or more than their talent makes getting the best teams in the playoffs impossible. Even adding a 30 game chase for the cup type schedule at the end wouldn't make things different. The best team in the league could run into injuries or the worst team in the round robin could get hot over a month and end up as champion. We have had some bad Brewers teams recently that had great first halves. Anything can happen over a month or even 5 months for that matter. We have witnessed first hand several Mets teams melt down in the last month only to miss the playoffs.

[sbrylski]

No matter how you format it you are going to get teams that don't belong get in and teams left out that should get a chance. The fact that teams can easily win 5+ games fewer or more than their talent makes getting the best teams in the playoffs impossible. Even adding a 30 game chase for the cup type schedule at the end wouldn't make things different. The best team in the league could run into injuries or the worst team in the round robin could get hot over a month and end up as champion. We have had some bad Brewers teams recently that had great first halves. Anything can happen over a month or even 5 months for that matter. We have witnessed first hand several Mets teams melt down in the last month only to miss the playoffs.

True, we are restricted to the accuracy of the sample that can be generated in one Earth's trip around the sun. But that doesn't mean we can't optimize it. The current system is split in two... a very large sample and a very small sample and neither are generated fairly. Its also pretty silly that the very small sample ends up holding more weight.

 

Using just one sample (winner of the regular season determines the champion) we've already agreed is the fairest, but unexciting. So we want a fair and optimized system with multiple samples of results. I'll say again that I know its not politically feasible, but my proposal tries to balance and improve upon each sample that is used to determine the champion.

 

The "traditional" regular season is shrunk to make room for a longer second sample. (Though every team still plays 162 games each year.) Its also more fair because it uses a balanced schedule to generate the results.

 

Next I had a second sample of results larger than the status quo's second sample. The participants are determined by our best possible estimate - the results of the balanced first 132 games. Both second samples are smaller than their respective regular season, but each win or loss is more meaningful because they're concentrating the best teams. But again, my proposal has a balanced schedule in this round as well, while the status quo of the LDS's are unbalanced, resulting in a fair estimate of who should move on.

 

My proposal then has the third sample of the traditional tournament style playoff. Tradition takes over here just by keeping it, but also by not mixing the AL and NL to balance the opportunities of the remain four teams to advance. (Why should one team be forced to play the best of the remaining teams while the other two teams get an easier matchup - each other? Only reason here is tradition.) But I think the tournament is improved by lengthening both the LCS's and the World Series. I also tried to go further by carrying earlier results over into the LCS's to increase the sample size as large as possible, but I can see that idea losing people (the few that might still be following me anyway.)

 

All three stages I believe to be improvements over the current regular and postseason stages. And by adding the extra round robin stage a more exciting and intense relay-race of a season emerges, rather than the marathon that exists currently (which has six unequal paths instead of one for all members, and the results of that marathon are thrown in a hat and then redrawn to find the "true" winner.)

 

And bringing this full circle back to the issue in variance of true results no matter how you slice the six months - that is why 12 and not two teams (AL and NL) are advancing into the second season, and two instead of one are advancing from the second season into the tournament style finale. As a second chance, but earned fairly.

 

Sounds more complicated than it is, I believe, and objectionable mostly because its a bit radical, but not on fundamental flaws. (Aside from the major political flaws that I understand exists, and the logistics flaws of short-notice scheduling as pointed out, though the logistics problem is not incredibly different than the one's faced by the current playoff system.)