One of the key points of contention in what figure to be very contentious labor negotiations in the coming weeks will be the expansion of MLB’s playoff field from 10 teams to 14. Purists like myself are very much against this, but the Braves’ recent World Series win may just be the push the other side needs to convince us stubborn folk that expansion is, in fact, a grand idea.
Look no further than this factoid that will surely leave fans of the Blue Jays and Mariners, two non-playoff teams in 2021, steaming: the Atlanta Braves finished the 2021 regular season with the 12th-best (!) record. It was good enough to win the National League Least, but by comparison, the Jays’ 91 wins were good enough for – wait for it – fourth-place in the American League East.
As if Mariners fans needed another painful reminder, their playoff drought now stands at two decades and counting, but with expansion, they, too, would have joined the party this October at long last. Instead, they settled for a second-place finish, five games shy of the eventual American League champion Astros.
What can be beautiful about baseball can be equally maddening. The good – nay, great – news is that the Dodgers, Astros, Red Sox, and Yankees all failed to win the World Series. Throw the Cardinals in there for good measure. Atlanta winning just the city’s second-ever major pro sports championship was about as good as a result as the average baseball fan could have hoped for. But the downside is that the current playoff format’s flaws were as evident as ever this October.
By winning their porous division, the Braves added more fuel to the fire that the field should be expanded to at least include more deserving wild card teams (like, you know, the Jays and Mariners). What’s even crazier is that, since the rule banning division rivals from facing off in the first round was scrapped with the advent of the wild card game in 2012, the team with the worst record of the five NL playoff teams ended up hosting the first two games of the NLCS despite an 18-win disparity. That’s because the 106-win Dodgers, who ousted the 107-win Giants in the NLDS, were still a wild card team. MLB’s playoff rules would have allowed the Dodgers to have had homefield advantage had they advanced to the World Series, but not in the NLDS or NLCS.
Of course, we can swing the pendulum back in our (the purists’) favor if we look a little deeper at the NL field this season. The 86-win Phillies and 83-win Reds would have been our No. 6 and No. 7 seeds, two teams that appeared to have little hope of pushing through the big boys of the Senior Circuit. Still, one can help but wonder if an 88-win World Series champion is the final push MLB needs to sell the players union on the idea. We all know it’s a money-grab at heart, but if there’s even the slightest hint of logic to it, the owners will undoubtedly get their way.
The other reality in play is that the Braves were, in fact, a very good team this year. The 88-73 record they carried into the playoffs was a bit misleading because of a slew of injuries and the fact that they had a pretty solid margin for error playing in baseball’s worst division in 2021. Once they added their outfield reinforcements at the trade deadline, they played outstanding baseball over the final two months. They were also one game shy of the shortened-season World Series last year and entered this season as one of the favorites in the NL.
Personally, I hate the idea of playoff expansion. If the owners simply cannot feel rich enough without squeezing a few more dollars out of their investment, a fair compromise would be to extend the wild card game into a best-of-three series, guaranteeing at least two and possibly four more games to the current slate. In an absolute worst-case scenario, MLB should adopt the playoff format the NFL used through 2019 with a 12-team field that involved the top two seeds getting byes. Nos. 3 and 6 would square off, as well as nos. 4 and 5, with the lowest remaining seed playing the top team in the league.
That said, these ideas likely make far too much sense for a commissioner like Rob Manfred to even consider, let alone implement. He has taken the cake from Roger Goodell as most disliked commissioner and is the sole owner of the dunce cap once donned by the NFL’s head honcho. The hope is that the players union, a much stronger group than the NFLPA, holds its ground and doesn’t get swayed by, say, the idea of a universal DH (after all, what would become of Zack Greinke’s magic bat?).
As we put a bow on the 2021 MLB season, the Braves are a deserving and refreshing champion. If nothing else, their win further highlights what an asterisk last year’s win by the Dodgers was, even if it came at the Braves’ expense in the bubble in Texas. Surviving the grind of a 162-game (or 161-game, in the Braves’ case) season and then outlasting the league’s elite teams in October is a completely different animal than a 60-game sprint played without fans. Atlanta was arguably more beat-up than its postseason counterparts, yet banded together to win its first title in 26 years. Not even the midseason purchases of Max Scherzer and Trea Turner to get the Dodgers the title that would have at least partially legitimized their 2020 win.
If in fact this is the end of the current playoff format as we know it, so be it. It feels inevitable, but we got nine good years out of it and got to witness an upstart Braves team wipe away the rotten memories of last year’s joke of a bubble postseason. Atlanta also proved that just because you win a bad division or enter the playoffs with a less-than-stellar record, it doesn’t mean you can’t still find another gear in October.
Congratulations, Braves. Thanks for the memories – and the potential send-off into an unwelcome new era of playoff baseball.
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