Much like college football’s playoff format that starts next year, baseball’s playoff format for the last two years is really stupid. This is in no way sour grapes because the Dodgers lost. All year long I thought that the Dodgers weren’t that good. Under a different playoff format, the Dodgers probably would have been quickly eliminated also. But this playoff format makes no sense.
Why do people making decisions insist on trying to destroy my two favorite sports?
I do have some more thoughts about the Dodgers before I get back to the playoff format. There are some really crazy fans out there. Dave Roberts is not a perfect manager, but he did an outstanding job this season. Winning 100 games with that team was special. They had two superstars, some solid role players, a broken legendary pitcher, some promising young pitchers, and a solid bullpen. They were not the Atlanta Braves (who are absolutely loaded with talent). I thought they would probably make the playoffs and maybe win the division, but that was about all I expected out of this team. By the time they got to the playoffs, they had one and a half starting pitchers (Clayton Kershaw was pretty much half of a starting pitcher after he returned from the injured list, he was pitching once a week and never went more than five and a third). The Dodgers won their last five regular season games against the Diamondbacks (in August) by a combined score of 30-9 so I thought they would beat the Diamondbacks and lose the NLCS, but this outcome was not completely surprising.
I’ve heard criticisms of Roberts in the playoffs this year and most of them are insane. One mistake that I think was made was going with Kershaw over Bobby Miller in Game 1. But that was probably as much of an Andrew Friedman decision as it was a Dave Roberts decision. And when you saw the way Bobby Miller pitched in Game 2, it probably wouldn’t have made a difference anyway. I heard people criticizing him for leaving Lance Lynn in too long in Game 3. And he probably did, but the series was over by then anyway. Dave Roberts managed a masterful Game 2, but the Dodgers couldn’t score enough runs. Their starting pitching was terrible and their two superstars were terrible. It didn’t matter what Dave Roberts did, they weren’t winning that series. From 1989-2015, the Dodgers got to the NLCS three times and didn’t make it to the World Series at all. In eight years under Dave Roberts, they’ve been to the NLCS five times, they’ve made it to the World Series three times, won it once, and were cheated out of it another time. In the last seven years, they’ve won 100 games five of the last seven years. In the other two years, they made the World Series both times and definitely would have won 100 games if there had been a full season in 2020. Obviously they’ve had more talent under Roberts than they did most of the time from 1989-2015, but they did have some good teams that didn’t come close to doing what the Dodgers have done under Roberts. So yeah, I will gladly take Dave Roberts back next year.
Anyway, yeah, the playoffs are stupid. If you play 162 games, they should matter. We’ve pretty much accepted that the regular season in the NBA is meaningless. It’s going to be really stupid in college football when we start getting teams with three or four losses into the College Football Playoff. And it’s really stupid that three teams with 90 wins and a team with 84 wins are the last four teams with a chance to win a championship while teams with 104, 101, 100, 99, and 92 wins had their seasons come to an end because of a bad stretch of two-four games (those five teams went a combined 1-13 in the playoffs). Why did we play 162 games if they mean so little in determining the champion?
So what can be done about it? I have some ideas, but no great answers that are also realistic. The first thing I would do would be to expand to 32 teams and go to two divisions of eight teams in each league. Expansion is probably coming. I would be fine with two divisions per league or four divisions per league. But I am also terrified of how they will realign. I have no confidence in Rob Manfred. We might end up with the Dodgers and Giants in different divisions or Eastern and Western conferences like the NBA and I’m not interested in something like that at all. But anyway, I would go back to the pre-1994 playoff format with only the four division winners making the playoffs. Let’s have the Rangers and Astros play Game 163 to break their tie and then the winner plays the Orioles, the Dodgers play the Braves, and teams that weren’t that good don’t get a chance to play for a championship. That will never happen though. I would be fine with going back to having four teams from each league make the playoffs like it was from 1995-2011. But that’s not going to happen either. I think it’s more likely that they would expand the playoffs to seven or eight teams per league making it (I think Manfred wanted seven teams per league during the lockout because Manfred is an idiot). If it was eight teams per league this year, there would have been two teams with 82 wins and a team with 83 wins in the playoffs. If you go 82-80, you do not deserve a chance to win the World Series. And the problem is that it’s entirely possible that a team that won 82 games could win a short series against a team that won 100+ games. In basketball, the 8 seed winning a series is so rare that you can live with it when it happens. But it would happen way too frequently in baseball.
So I don’t want the playoffs to expand and they’re not going to contract, so let’s try to figure out what can be done if we leave it at six teams per league. You could try to get rid of off days. Baseball is a sport that’s played pretty much every day for six months (longer than that if you include spring training). But then if you’re one of the two best teams in your league, you have to sit and wait for an extended period. The Dodgers won 100 games and then had their season come to an end after playing three games in 10 days. So you could get rid of the off day between the end of the regular season and the start of the Wild Card series. I doubt they would do that though because they probably want to keep a day open in case you need to make up any rainouts at the end of the season if they could determine playoff spots. You could also eliminate the day off between the possible third game of the Wild Card series and the next round. But again, they probably want to keep that day open in case a game gets rained out in the Wild Card series. So if you can’t get rid of those off days, I would go back just having a Wild Card Game instead of a three-game series. When it was just one game, it was a bigger disadvantage for the teams that had to play the game. You would probably use your best starter and then he wouldn’t be available to pitch in until Game 3 in the next round (and you might even use other starters if necessary to win that one game). But with the three game series and off days, you have a chance to really line up your pitching for the next round (especially if you can win the Wild Card series in two games). If Dodgers-Diamondbacks had gone five games, the Diamondbacks would have had their top two pitchers start four of the five games. I know probability says that it’s an advantage to not have to play the Wild Card series (since you can’t get eliminated in that round), but I think it actually becomes an advantage for the team that manages to survive that series. If they can line up their pitching and they haven’t had an abnormal number of off days, that’s an advantage. But they’ll never go back to the one game Wild Card round instead of a three-game series because that would mean less TV money.
I do have a few ideas to give more advantages to the teams that get the byes (or at least limit the disadvantages). The most obvious thing is to give a bigger advantage to the number 1 seed by reseeding. I don’t know how they haven’t figured this out yet. The Braves had the best record in the NL by four games. When the Diamondbacks pull off the upset in the Wild Card series, the Braves should get to play them. Why do the Braves have to deal with the Phillies while the Dodgers get the worse opponent? That makes no sense.
You could make everything after the Wild Card round best of seven. That would reduce randomness and give the better teams a better chance to win. But you would still get weird results. It’s fairly likely that none of the results would have been changed this year if they were best of seven instead of best of five. So I’m not opposed to making it best of seven, but I’m okay with best of five.
I would make the winner of the Wild Card Series go on the road for every game in the next round. The higher seed gets the whole Wild Card series at home. Do the same thing for the next round.
Neither of those ideas do anything to help with all the days off. But I came up with something that probably sounds unrealistic, but it would make money and these decisions are all driven by money so maybe it isn’t unrealistic. You have four teams who get byes. Have the 1 seed in each league host a two-game exhibition series against the 2 seed in the opposite league while the Wild Card round is going on. So it would have been Dodgers at Orioles and Astros at Braves. Teams would definitely be able to sell tickets for those games and you could throw them on MLB Network as possible World Series previews and everybody could make money. If teams think it’s a disadvantage to have their hitters sitting around not facing pitching in a game for five days, here’s your opportunity to have them play actual baseball instead of batting practice or intrasquad games. Maybe teams wouldn’t take those games seriously, but it would certainly take away an excuse. If you want to choose to not play your best hitters in those games, then you couldn’t complain about being off all that time when you had a chance to play games before your playoff games.
So yeah, there are way too many teams in the playoffs. I try to enjoy the regular season as much as I can. If you’re going to play that many games, they should mean something. So I enjoyed the Dodgers winning 100 games this season. And between my low expectations and the stupidity of this playoff format, the Dodgers getting eliminated in the playoffs this year was their easiest elimination for me to deal with out of all the times they’ve been eliminated from the playoffs over the last 15 years. The worst at the time was 2019 and the worst in hindsight was 2017 because they were cheated out of a World Series championship (and one that wouldn’t have been random baseball playoff flukiness because they were the best team in baseball that year).
Anyway, Rob Manfred is in charge so if anything is going to change, it will probably just be him making it worse. As for the rest of the playoffs this year, I will absolutely be rooting for 2020 World Series hero Corey Seager to beat the Astros and win the World Series. Speaking of the Astros, it’s time to bring back my Sports Villain Power Rankings. This is the fourth time I’ve done this (previously in April 2022, October 2022, and April 2023).
25. Sidney Crosby
24. Ime Udoka
23. Damian Lillard
22. Kevin Durant
21. Anthony Davis
20. James Harden
19. Jimmy Butler
18. Kyrie Irving
17. LeBron James
Hockey has started and Sidney Crosby will always be a villain. Basketball is about to start. Ime Udoka is a good coach, but the Celtics couldn’t keep him because of his own stupidity. Lillard was all about loyalty until he wasn’t anymore and he only wanted to go the the Heat (my least favorite NBA team other than the Lakers). Durant, Davis, Irving, and James are obvious. Harden is an obvious villain, but he has to rank behind Butler because he disappeared and lost to the Celtics in the playoffs while Butler transforms from good NBA player to superstar NBA player in the playoffs and he eliminated the Celtics last year. If I went to a number 26 on this list, it might have been the Heat’s PA announcer because whenever Jimmy Butler scores, it’s not Jimmy Butler, it’s “JIH MEE BUTLER.” It gets very annoying during a seven game series. Many of these players will rank much higher when we get to the spring.
16. Lane Kiffin
15. Dabo Swinney
14. Ryan Day
13. Deion Sanders
12. Pete Carroll
11. Bill Belichick
10. Jim Harbaugh
9. Lincoln Riley
Lane Kiffin has pretty much been a villain for this whole century. For some reason, people decided to start liking him over the last five years. I don’t get it. Dabo Swinney has been a villain since 2020. He would rank higher, but Clemson has taken a step back. Ryan Day is a new villain for two reasons. First of all, he’s let Michigan turn the tide in that rivalry. Second of all, he had a completely insane reaction to beating Notre Dame. When you’re making me think of Pedro Martinez throwing Don Zimmer to the ground, that’s a problem. Everybody loves Deion Sanders, but not me. He pretty much ran off Colorado’s entire team and brought in a whole team of mercenaries. That is not what college athletics should be. If you’re a new coach, you should do everything you can to help the players who were already there. They should be able to graduate from the school they committed to and be coached to be the best players they can be (even if they’re not very good players). But I will give Deion Sanders credit for one thing. When Henry Blackburn was getting death threats after his late hit on a Colorado player, Deion Sanders handled that very well. Carroll, Belichick, Harbaugh, and Riley are obvious.
8. Jack Swarbrick
He probably should have been on my previous lists for allowing home games to be broadcast on Peacock only (forcing people to pay to watch one of our worst home games each season is stupid to begin with, but the streaming experience was absolutely terrible this year). He also enabled Brian Kelly’s nonsense by allowing him to get rid of the pregame Mass (which Marcus Freeman fortunately brought back) and putting in fake grass in the football stadium. He’s allowed Adidas and Under Armor to dress Notre Dame’s football team up in silly outfits for Shamrock Series games. He deserved to be considered a villain for all of those reasons, but the reason that I finally put him on this list is because he completely bungled the hiring of Notre Dame’s offensive coordinator. This is entirely his fault and not Marcus Freeman’s. He put Freeman in a bad position. Fortunately he won’t be our athletic director for much longer.
6. (tie) Trevor Bauer and Julio Urias
The Dodgers were down to one and a half starting pitchers because these guys were terrible people who will never be allowed to pitch for the Dodgers again.
5. Brian Kelly
4. Rob Manfred
They’re always going to be near the top of the list, but probably not number 1 (although Kelly could be much closer to number 1 if he ever made a national championship run at LSU).
1. (Tie) Jose Altuve, Alex Bregman, and Caleb Williams
It’s the cheating Astros who are still in the playoffs plus the most dislikeable college football player since Reggie Bush.
