{"id":385,"date":"2009-09-24T15:52:39","date_gmt":"2009-09-24T19:52:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.broadstreetbelievers.com\/?p=385"},"modified":"2009-09-24T15:54:09","modified_gmt":"2009-09-24T19:54:09","slug":"dont-change-the-mlb-playoffs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/?p=385","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Change the MLB Playoffs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"gammons\"Peter Gammons is one of the best sports journalists of his time, and he seems like a pretty cool dude too, but I have to disagree with his suggestion that the MLB should consider expanding the playoffs to 10 teams<\/a>.\u00a0 His basic argument is that baseball has been lost amid the start of football season this year, with no one paying attention because the only pennant race is between the Tigers and Twins in the AL Central.<\/p>\n

First of all, let me say that I’ve always liked the addition of the Wild Card in 1995.\u00a0 I’m not an anti-change purist.\u00a0 It’s added a lot to the excitement of September and it’s made it more fair for teams that play in tough divisions, like the AL East.\u00a0 But adding another wild card to each league is going too far.\u00a0 Baseball teams play a grueling, marathon season of 162 games, and to further dilute the season by opening up more playoff spots just seems like a bad idea.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Under the proposal Gammons talks about, the two wild card teams from each league would play each other in a best-of-three “play-in” series.\u00a0 That’s better than giving two teams a bye or something like that, but it’s still problematic.\u00a0 We’ve all seen how anything can happen in a best-of-five series, what would a best-of-three be like?\u00a0 Not that I like to defend the Red Sox, but right now they’re 7 games ahead of the Rangers.\u00a0 Should they really have to put their season on the line in a best-of-three series against a team that they were that much clearly better than over 162 games?\u00a0 I say no.<\/p>\n

Beyond those\u00a0reasons though, the notion that September baseball isn’t exciting enough is just plain wrong.\u00a0 As Gammons says in the article, “…this may be an overreaction to a September in which there are essentially no races.”\u00a0 Yes, Peter, that’s what it is.\u00a0\u00a0Maybe it’s just because I’m a Phillies fan, but I seem to remember PLENTY of excitement in September this decade.\u00a0 To confirm, I went back and looked at\u00a0the standings with 10-15 games\u00a0left over the last four seasons.\u00a0 In that time, there were 24 division titles won, and exactly half of them were still up for grabs at that point of the season.\u00a0 Of the 8\u00a0Wild Cards won in that span, 5 of them\u00a0were still undecided.\u00a0 So clearly, the lack of drama this\u00a0September is a pretty rare\u00a0occurence.\u00a0 The system is working well, let’s\u00a0leave it exactly how it is.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Gammons is one of the best sports journalists of his time, and he seems like a pretty cool dude too, but I have to disagree with his suggestion that the MLB should consider expanding the playoffs to 10 teams.\u00a0 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[750,360],"class_list":["post-385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mlb","tag-peter-gammons","tag-playoffs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}