The Philadelphia Phillies beat the Houston Astros 9–1 in Game 3, taking a 2–1 lead in the best-of-seven World Series in doing so. But I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to talk about how postseason baseball this year has been dominated by a conversation over the fact that playoffs are a coin flip. The regular season is a lengthy 162 games, which is more than enough time for a team to prove its dominance, mediocrity or ineptitude. The playoffs, though, are made up of a few series of best-of-five and best-of-seven games. The wild card games, which dictate who gets into the postseason among the teams on the fringe of making the playoffs, are individual games. Lose once, and that’s it.
The upshot of all this is that the best team in any given season may well not win the World Series. The Phillies won 87 games in the regular season, good for an anemic 11th best in the 30-team Major League, but they now find themselves in pole position to win the World Series. The Atlanta Braves, meanwhile, won an impressive 101 games in the regular season and lost weakly to the Phillies in the best-of-five National League Division Series (NLDS). “We [the Braves] won 101 games in the regular season and the Phillies won 87,” said Braves enthusiast Danny Lee
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23. “It’s f*cking bullsh*t.” Partisanship aside, the point is worth considering: last year, the Braves won 88 games, 13 fewer than this season, and they won the World Series. The Los Angeles Dodgers had it even worse in 2022, compiling a glorious 111–51 record in the regular season, comfortably the best record of any team, and losing to the 89–73 Padres in the first round of the playoffs.
It cannot feel great for a team and their fans to excel over the marathon regular season only for inferior teams to sprint past them in the final meters of the race. People are already not particularly inclined to view the MLB positively. Derek Thompson of
The Atlantic
wrote a piece on Oct. 30 slamming baseball for its analytics revolution, essentially saying that the perfection of strategy has sucked the excitement out of the sport. “Smarties approached baseball like an equation, optimized for Y, solved for X, and proved in the process that a solved sport is a worse one,” Thompson wrote. “The sport that I fell in love with doesn’t really exist anymore. In the 1990s, there were typically 50 percent more hits than strikeouts in each game. Today, there are consistently more strikeouts than hits.”
He isn’t wrong. Baseball has undergone something of a tactical revolution in the past few decades. Especially in the playoffs, starting pitchers rarely stay in for more than six or seven innings now, allowing teams to replace them with relievers for a single inning at a time. More often than not, a fresh arm throwing 98 mile-per-hour bullets proves unhittable, turning many games into low-scoring affairs. Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees hit an American League record 62 home runs this season, which turned heads, but the record was exciting precisely because it was the first big baseball record to come along in a while. Baseball strategies have been refined into ironclad molds, which technically allows the game to operate at a higher level, but simultaneously vacuums up much of the surprise.
Upsets, then, may be an increasingly important part of baseball. If the patterns of play themselves are so consistent, fans might look for tumultuous results to add spice to the sport. If you support the underdog, upsets are thrilling, and if you support the favorite, they will break your heart — either way, you feel something intense. The problem, though, is that in the baseball playoff format, it is no longer surprising when an inferior team beats a superior one. A good underdog story cannot exist without the presence of a clear underdog. If each team has virtually the same chance to win the World Series at the onset of the playoffs, the postseason is not a clash of the titans, it’s a crapshoot.
I have no idea where baseball goes from here. It is the second-biggest sport in the United States, so we are not exactly talking about a crisis. Still, if the point of sports is to determine the best competitor(s), baseball might want to take a look at its season format, because the current layout is not getting it done.
