On Best (part 1)
One thing that fascinates me about sports is the cultures that coalesce around them, and the extent to which members of that culture are willing to normalize things that are generally harmless but also insane. Like how we start with the premise of football being that each team tries to carry a ball to one end of a field while the other team tries to stop them. That’s a straightforward enough idea for a game. Then we all agree that, if teams are willing to settle for ½ the points of this primary goal, they can also bring out someone who kicks the ball between two poles in the air, as if that’s not super weird. That’s so normal in football that teams hire guys who only do that.
For that matter, consider the idea of ending soccer matches with a shoot-out. I know that penalty kicks happen during normal time. But a shoot-out is essentially determining the winner of a game by making the teams play a different game. Even soccer doesn’t like it. If the score is even after extra time in a game that isn’t consequential for something like tournament seeding, they just call it a tie and skip the shoot-out altogether, which is also weird. It’s just something you accept when you live in the world of soccer. Not all sports but soccer, specifically. We don’t end basketball games with free-throw competitions. That would be crazy.
Baseball is baseball from start to finish. Yet, for all the steadfast levelheadedness of unwaveringly consistent, theoretically infinite, extra innings, baseball is clearly not exempt from rulebook oddities. A batter is out after an umpire calls a third strike unless the catcher drops the pitch at which point it becomes a lives ball and the batter can run to first unless first base is occupied which means the ball is not live and the batter cannot run to first and is out unless there are already two out which means the batter can run to first forcing the runner on first to run to second. That rule dates back to before the National League and American League merged. There is an answer as to why it exists. It doesn’t make it any less insane.
Quirks like these have a way of making sports fun, though. Remember 30 seconds ago when I implied shoot-outs were ridiculous? I’d also like to posit that they are awesome. Human being are so enamored with anomalies that we embed them into all sorts of pastimes constantly, (see castling in chess. Seriously, what the hell?). Still, there’s a delicate balance when it comes to idiosyncrasies and games. The entertainment value of sports is embedded in the idea that the outcome is uncertain. There is a reason the Chicago Bulls generate more revenue than the Harlem Globetrotters (to whom I mean no disrespect, and have seen live, and are great. But if you don’t know the story, you should read up on the time they accidentally lost to the Generals in 1971 and tell me that’s not oddly, sadly compelling and just so devastatingly human. Anyway…). Oddities can fuel that uncertainty, allowing players and teams to draw from deeper darker corners of the unexpected. However, while we crave that uncertainty, we’re also not particularly compelled by utter randomness. Don’t give us a foregone conclusion, but don’t give us pure luck either.
The question here becomes — how much can we meddle with the rules, adding exciting eccentricities here and there, before they start to dominate the foundation upon which the game exists? When is the game altered into something unrecognizable, and that inner child that connects us to the games we love starts to slip into the playground chorus of the spurned…
“… but that’s not fair”.
The question I’d like to pose, specifically, is whether Major League Baseball’s post-season has evolved so much that it has divorced itself fully from the regular season. Of course, the stakes are higher, the pressure is on, there’s an electricity in the air. But is it more than that? Is it a fundamentally different game?
If this question doesn’t seem reasonable at first glance, consider the debate of whether we’re even putting the right teams in the playoffs. In 2023 the Dodgers won 100 games while only losing 62. I could argue that seeing triple digits in the win column is a function of a dominant Dodgers performance, but there is a pesky caveat that they got to play the 59–103 Colorado Rockies more often than they played most other teams. Maybe the Dodgers wouldn’t be that good if the Rockies weren’t so bad. Or maybe the Rockies wouldn’t be that bad if the Dodgers weren’t so good.
The Twins made the playoffs with an 87–75 record. That’s a perfectly respectable record, but not a single other team in the American League Central played .500 ball. Second place was the Tigers at 78–84, and in fifth were the Royals, 56–106. Should 87 wins earn you a playoff spot when a bulk of your schedule is against teams that don’t win half their games? I’m not here to answer these questions (at least not in Part 1). My point is rather that these questions exist at all.
From the time the circuits merged in 1903 through the 1968 season, the World Series was played between the team with the best record in the National League and the team with the best record in the American League. And perhaps more importantly, during that time frame, every team played every other team in their league the same number of times. One could speculate how a non-pennant winner from the AL might fare in the NL or vice versa, but it was hard to debate who had earned their shot at the championship.
Starting with the 1969 season, MLB broke the two leagues into two divisions each. Since teams now played other teams in their division more often than teams outside their division, this necessitated a playoff series to determine each league’s pennant winner (i.e. World Series contender). The League Championship Series was born and permanently disrupted the notion of what it meant to be “best”.
To put this in context, for the first 65 World Series (1903, 1905–1968), the World Series winner had the best record in their league 100% of the time. By definition. That’s how you got into the World Series. From 1969 to 1993 (except 1981 when the playoffs were different following a labor dispute), teams needed to first win their respective LCS to advance to the World Series, and the percentage of World Series winners during that time who could also claim their league’s best record during the regular season was slashed to 62.5%.
There was no World Series in 1994 due to a player’s strike which shortened the 1994 and 1995 seasons. When things started back up, leagues had been restructured to have 3 divisions each. The team with the best record in each division would advance to the postseason along with the best record amongst all the remain teams (a so-called “wildcard”). Now a division series would determine the pennant contenders. From 1995 through 2011, when the post-season dust had settled, the World Series victor held the best regular season record in their respective league just 35.29% of the time. It only took three season for a wildcard to win the World Series; the 1997 Florida Marlins, who actually had a better record (92–70) than two NL division winners, but not nearly as good a record as the Atlanta Braves (101–61) who they beat four game to two in the NLCS.
In 2012 Major League Baseball added a second wildcard to the mix in each league and in 2022, a third. There have only been two seasons in which there are as many wildcards as there are division winners. In the first, the World Series went to the Houston Astros who did, in fact, have the best record in the AL. It’s worth noting however, that they defeated the Philadelphia Phillies who were not just a wildcard, but the NL’s first ever third wildcard. Last year the Texas Rangers (AL’s second wildcard) defeated the Arizona Diamondback who were, for the second year in a row, the NL’s third wildcard. It was a World Series match-up between two teams who would not have seen post-season play during Major League Baseball’s first 110 year of existence.
What’s become muddied here is what it means to be the “best”. One could argue that all this tinkering with the playoff structure is actually meant to get us closer to identifying the “best” team. Once the schedule becomes anything other than an even round-robin structure, then the “best record” becomes conceivably divorced from the “best team”. A division series is thus designed to alleviate that. But, whack-a-mole style, a new doubt creeps in. Ok, you made the two division winners go head-to-head, but what if the second-place team in the East is actually better than the first place team in the West? If we’re going to set aside seven games to determine who we really want to represent our league in the championship, maybe it should actually be those two duking it out, yeah? And so, a wildcard is instituted.
Herein lies what I find so fascinating about baseball as a culture. The way it adapts and changes right underneath our noses, without ever losing that sense that this game is a timeless constant in our lives. What I’m suggesting that MLB is risking here with their post-season restructuring is failing to notice that they’ve created something entirely new. The more complex the post-season tournament becomes, the more you risk creating a game that requires a fundamentally different approach. I’m not talking about simply “stepping-up your game”. I’m talking about letting go of the notion that playoff baseball is an elevated version of the 162 games these teams just finished, and realizing that the game they’re playing in October is a different game, one in which the key elements for success are simply not the same. And that means that the “best” regular season team is not necessarily built or poised to be the “best” post-season team.
If I’m a manger looking back at the last two seasons, I’m starting to ask myself if winning 100+ regular season games is even my goal anymore. When I’m filling out my lineup card or scouting new players, I have to ask myself if the talent that can achieve that sort of regular season success is the same talent that wins a World Series, because that’s not a given anymore. Of the 30 teams in Major League Baseball, 12 are going to make the playoffs. That’s 40% of teams. Last year there was a full 20 win discrepancy between the best and worst records among teams that still made the playoffs. How much rest can I give my star players if I’m willing to sacrifice upwards of 20 regular season wins, and how much is that rest going to benefit my post-season roster?
In other words, it is absolutely conceivable that the evolving structure of post-season baseball is also ushering in a regular season approach wherein try-to-position-my-team-for-the-playoffs begins to eclipse an approach of just-get-out-there-and-win. And I think we risk losing something there.
Certainly, it comes down to what people want. Consider college basketball. Regular season college basketball is plenty popular, but it cannot hold a candle to March Madness. Sports fans love the drama of tournament style play. We can’t help it. So maybe it’s inevitable as our national pastime becomes increasingly commercialized, decade after decade, that post-season play begins to elbow out the regular season.
Still, I contend that there is something sacred about the regular season. Even if we expect things to shake out after a long summer, perhaps more so than any other sport, we believe that one big league team can beat any other big league team on any given day. There is something almost holy about bearing witness to the unfolding of a baseball game, with its delicate balance of consistency and uncertainty, its steady precise march to its conclusion. The crux of that brush with divinity, however, is the concise vulnerability of two teams with a singular goal — we just want to win, in this moment, right now.
I suppose I’ll close with an open message to Major League Baseball: If my appeal to a reverence for baseball’s solemnity doesn’t tug at your heart strings, we can get down to brass tacks. I assume you’d still like to make some money off the regular season, and I’m just saying... 162 is an awful lot of games for me to care about if try-to-win isn’t even optimal anymore.
— JB
