John Harper points out a negative about the wild card. Division races between two great teams are less interesting. We’re never going to get the excitement that we saw in 1978 or 1993 again, and a great team will never again experience the tragedy of losing on the last day of the season. It’s something I grew up with, and something I miss.
Not me. I was a fan of the ’69 Cubs and ’93 Giants, among other heartbreak teams that should have at least gotten to the postseason, and on the other side, of the 2001 A’s (probably the best Billy Beane team) would have been out of it by mid-May if there hadn’t been a wild card due to Seattle’s remarkable start.
What year was it when Baltimore had the second best record in baseball, with 100 wins, but finished 3 games behind the Yankees?
Even as a kid that struck me as unfair, the second best team in baseball being shut out of the post season. Meanwhile, the NBA & NHL let everyone and their grandmother into the playoffs. Which go on forever, and are thus less compelling.
I don’t like the wild card very much. I like the idea of a pennant race and there really is not that much excitement when the Rays and Yankees play.
In the 6-team divisions, you pretty much just played in your own division in Sept. So if there was a race, it was like the whole month of September was a playoff. But if each division was a runaway, there was not much excitement. But if it had been just one league, then those two division leaders would have had a great pennant race. But even in the pre-divisional era, one team could run away with it and the there would not be much excitement.
So there might not be any setup that guarantees an exciting race down the stretch. If you have two good teams in each division and they all have similar records, the last month can be very exciting with those 6 teams fight for 4 playoff spots. But what if each division is a runaway. Then the only thing of interest is the wild card. Big deal.
The White Sox had the best record baseball from 1963-67, yet never made it to even one world series. The Sox also had the best record in the AL from 1990-94 and had just one post season appearance and no world series appearance (the strike in 1994 hurt, too). So, as a White Sox fan, a wild card back in either one of these periods would have been nice.
The question is: how do you set up the league, schedule and playoffs to maximize excitement? I think Bill James said he was going to start working on questions like that but I don’t know if he has come up with anything.
Yea, let’s get nostalgic about “great teams” missing the playoffs. That was so much fun.
Plenty of races have come down to the wire since the Wild Card was introduced, just not in divisions with exactly two really good teams.
Other than having more balanced schedules, the current setup is as good as it gets.
@Cyril Morong: I wrote some pieces for BP a couple of years ago that tried to deal with this. I’d like to see eight divisions of four teams each (so add two teams), with the divisions arranged by won-lost record the previous season. The four best teams would go in the first division, down to the four worst teams in the last division. This would mean each division would be fairly evenly balanced, and poor clubs like the Pirates and Royals would at least get a chance to make the playoffs. This would make it difficult for dynasties to form, but it would also likely lead to teams with <.500 records making the playoffs.
Didn’t the Angels collapse in ’95? I don’t know if they qualify as a great team, but they sure had that division wrapped up and then gave it away….and never even made the Wild Card.
@ rbj …that was 1980.
@Cy …I’d like to see them alter the Sepember schedule to a more “march madness” style schedule. For example… one weekend the teams could be scheduled as:
AL East 1st place team vs 3rd place team
AL East 2nd place team vs AL Cent 1st place
AL West 1st place team vs AL West 2nd place
AL Cent 2nd place team vs AL West 3rd place
…then another weekend might be something like:
AL East 2nd place vs 1st place
AL Cent 2nd place vs 1st place
AL West 2nd vs 1st place
….so even if the Orioles suddenly surprised everyone and found themselves in 2nd place, they wouldn’t be relegated to playing another team who’s out of it. This way the teams that make it to October, had to battle for it….not back into it or get a gift by playing a team like Cleveland.
I agree that there was a sort of romance in the “win the pennant race or go home, even if you had a great record” concept that was lost when the Wild Card was introduced. It was the main reason I didn’t and still don’t like the Wild Card.
If you think its not “fair” that a team that wins 100 games sits out the playoffs because there is team in their division that wins 103 games, consider the fairness of the 103 game winner losing a close playoff series to another team that won their division with 87 games. Or even losing the series to the 100 game winner Wildcard entrant that, while it had an excellent record, it still just beat in the regular season divisional race.
This is an interesting topic for me, and I did some math with this.
When MLB went to a three divisional system, and created the Wild Card, they doubled the number of playoff teams, from four to eight, and tripled the number of non World Series playoff series, from two to six. This was the whole reason why they did this, for the extra revenue from those four extra series.
All else being equal, a team starts the season with about a 27% chance of making the playoffs. During the divisional series era, a team had around a 14% to 17% chance of making the playoffs. During the pre-divisional, pre-expansion period, a team started the season with a 12.5% chance of making the playoffs, and the National League team would have had that same chance if MLB has stuck to the two division system and had two eight team NL divisions and two six team AL divisions.
In terms of generating additional playoff teams and series, the creation of the two Central divisions played as important a role as the introduction of the Wildcard. The creation of the two Central divisions also created two more divisional races. However, MLB effectively removed two divisional races at the same time, in the divisions where two teams qualify for the playoffs due to the Wildcard. I don’t think a race between a 2nd and 3rd place team is much of a race, nor is there really a Wildcard race since dethroned divisional leaders can fall into the Wildcard spot. However, the chance of a good divisional races should be equal to the 1969-93 period, all that happened in 1994 was that two races were potentially added and two potentially subtracted.
Checking through the seasonal standings since 1995, it turns out that we “lost” 18 divisional races that would have happened if the MLB had retained the four division, four playoff team system, assuming no realignment from the 1969-95 divisions except the Brewers league switch. We “gained” an extra 14 races through the creation of the third division in each league.
By “race” I mean each situation where the two two teams finished within three games of each other in the final standings, though some of these situations are cases of a team wrapping up a playoff spot early and coasting, or another team putting together a good record in late games after it had effectively been eliminated. But these situations would even out between the “lost” 18 and the “gained” 14 races.
However, the “lost” races almost by definition tended to involve teams with better won-loss records than the “gained” races. So arguably the “lost” races would have been more exciting. But then there are the extra 60 playoff series added in the last 15 years.
For example, last year the existance of the AL Central division gave us the Twins exciting finish against the Tigers. But then we lost what would have been an exciting race between the Phillies and Cardinals in the pre-1995 NL East.
Would it have been better to have a Dodgers -Rockies NL West divisional race last year, or the Phillies -Rockies playoff series that actually took place? These things are really matters of taste. The post-1995 system provided playoff series between the Twins and Yankees, Angels and Red Sox, Dodgers and Cardinals, and Phillies and Rockies, plus the AL Central Race, and cost us the Phillies-Cardinals and Dodgers Rockies race.
One clear thing the 1995 changes did was to increase the number of playoff teams, and the chance of each team making the playoffs. So any proposed change should address how many teams should make the playoffs and what should be a team’s chances of getting into the postseason. I’m a traditionalist, but I don’t think we will go back to the 12.5% chance of the classic era. But I think the current number is too high, I would prefer six playoff teams would would give each team a 20% chance at the start of the season. Increased interest in the remaining races and playoff series might even make up from the lost revenue from getting rid of a couple of the lower tier series.
Going to six playoff teams means either four divisions and two wildcards, or six divisions and two teams getting a by in the first round. I would prefer the latter. It doesn’t have to be two leagues, three divisions; someone came up with a three leagues with two divisions proposal I’m partial to, with the pennant winners of the leagues with the weaker interleague play records playing to see who plays the pennant winner of the strongest league in the World Series.
Just one more post on this topic. The team that has arguably benefitted most from the Wildcard has been the Yankees. Their payroll tends to enable them to claim one of the top four won-loss records in the American League, which is usually enough for a wildcard spot. A number of those frustrating 1980s teams would have qualified for the Wildcard, if it had been in existence then, and some of the late 1990s dynasty teams would have lost the AL East race to the Orioles or Indians and not made the playoffs.
I don’t think you should base considerations of these things around helping or hurting a specific team, but its interesting that under the four divsisional system, the Yankees dynasty years would probably have been in the Oughts instead of the Nineties.
I think another interesting setup would be for baseball to follow the European soccer league set-up – have a regular season with a pennant-winner in each league (just the team with the best record in that league), and concurrently to the regular season hold a knock-out ‘cup’ competition that every team gets to play in, and that culminates in the World Series at the end of the season.
This would resurrect the old accomplishment of winning the pennant that doesn’t really exist today, plus it preserves the World Series and actually delivers playoff excitement throughout the entire season.
And the new standard for team greatness becomes winning both the regular season pennant and the Series in the same year.
Right now the AL has one interesting race, the central. That is between the 5th and 6th best teams in the league. The Yanks and Rays are not really in a race since they both are so far ahead of everyone else. The AL wild card really is not that interesting.
At least the NL is pretty close to what I described above. 6 teams, 2 in each division, all with similar records, fighting for 4 spots. 2 teams are within 3.5 of the wild card. And the 2nd place team in each division is no more than 2.5 games out of first.
But I would still like to see the very best teams fight for first place. It is just that there is no guarantee with either the 1 league set up or the 2 division set up that the last month of the season will be exciting. I think that Ed’s analysis tends to favor having races for firs place as turning out better over time.
Forget any extra playoff teams or games because they overshadow baseball’s most important features pennant races and the World Series.
Another thing that needs to be looked at is how baseball hurt the season in 1969 by going to 2 divisions per league and playing so many games against teams that were not rivals for the same pennant.
Go back to 2 divisions per league and put the focus back on the regular season and the World Series by playing most games against rivals for the same pennant (78%). Play the other 22% against teams from your league’s other division based on a team’s finish in the standings.
By putting the focus on pennant races and the World Series baseball will have higher ratings in Sept. and Oct. and more revenues from media.