Originally Posted by
padre33
All good points and Druff aint changing his mind on anything. I like to think of myself as a traditionalist cause I like the numbers, but more playoffs is good imo. Better than the NBA midseason tourney being floated.
More playoffs is not good! Baseball has more game-to-game variance than any other major sport, by a wide margin.
Last year's playoffs was a good example. First, the Dodgers had to play a team in a 1-game playoff, despite a 16-game difference in the standings! Then, in the NLDS, they had to face the only team in baseball with a better record than them -- the Giants! This not only risked the Dodgers being out before the division series even started, but also guaranteed that the NLCS would NOT feature the best two teams in the league. Sad!
If we had a 14-team format, the Phillies and Reds, both of which were near .500, would have had the chance to win the World Series if they just got hot at the right time. No good.
In fact, they need to extend the wildcard game to 3 games, to reduce the insane variance.
Another idea is to give the best team in each league a bye to the League Championship series, and then have the other 4 play it out to face them. That would induce some excitement into the race to finish with the best record.
There is a theory that teams chasing the best record simply burn themselves out, and end up losing in the playoffs. That's probably what happened to the 2021 Dodgers, as you could tell Buehler and Scherzer had nothing left, and they had injuries to position players on top of that.