Padding Baseball Playoffs Produces So-What Games

More is not necessarily better. More is just more.

Baseball once took a minimalist approach to the postseason, offering two pennant races and one World Series and then sitting back and watching the survivors battle it out, an arrangement that often produced great theater.

Now, it takes half of October to get to that stage, thanks to the expanded postseason with its extra layer of playoffs. This anomaly is referred to by the proprietors as the Division Series. It was invented to accommodate wild-card teams--that is, teams that don’t finish first.

Baseball, being an equal opportunity sport, felt obliged to offer losers a second chance. The Division Series was created, as it often seems all things are, for the sake of the sport’s network partners. Dress up the also-rans with fancy makeup and pretty clothes and maybe people will be convinced they belong. Put them in mediocre divisions and if they finish first, they qualify.

It would be nice to report that this creation has consistently provided pulsating, dramatic games, memorable October baseball. Sadly, though, it has not. Except for two compelling, five-game struggles by the New York Yankees, first against Seattle in 1995 and this year against Cleveland, the extra layer has been pockmarked by so-what games.

The National League has been particularly vulnerable to first-round shrugs. Can you remember last season’s NL playoff also-rans? Those postseason patsies from San Diego and Los Angeles staged a gallant last-day struggle to see which one could avoid Atlanta in the first round. It hardly mattered. Both were swept. The year before, the Dodgers bailed out in three games and Colorado went in four.

In the American League, the Yankees embraced the wild-card berth, largely because it allowed them to avoid Seattle in the first round and play the first two games at home. It didn’t exactly help but there is something inherently wrong with a system that rewards also-rans.

Since baseball came up with this recipe, there have been 12 division series and six of them ended in three-game sweeps. In three years, there have been five sweeps in the NL and the other series ended in four games.

This year’s “Hello, I must be going” playoff awards go to San Francisco and Houston, sent packing in a hurry by Florida and Atlanta.

So long, Giants and Astros, we hardly knew ye.

It hardly seems fair. Baseball’s summer is a 162-game marathon that starts in the cool of spring, winds through the heat of summer, and ends with the leaves changing color in the fall. Make it through that grind and the payoff is being thrust into a best-of-5 shotgun sprint that can be over in a heartbeat. Lose the first two games and teams are immediately placed on life support with no margin for error. That’s what happened to the Giants and Astros.

The system is out of whack. To decide the championship, you match up the teams with the two best records. The NL lucked out when Florida and Atlanta survived the five-game shotgun round, providing the proper pairing for the pennant playoff. How old fashioned to have the teams with the best won-lost records playing for the championship.

The American League was not as fortunate. Baltimore survived the Seattle menace that New York wanted to avoid, but the Yankees were victimized by Cleveland. The accomplishments of the long summer, the second best record in the league, were wasted. And the Indians, equipped with the league’s fourth best record, advanced to the pennant playoff.

All of this, of course, is a just a function of having leagues subdivided into three divisions, another dandy invention by the owners. There was no great outcry by the American public for baseball to add the extra divisions. It was done only to create the illusion of more playoff-worthy teams.

Now the same community of owners that came up with that formula wrestles with realignment, moving 30 teams around like game pieces from one league to the other. Leave them alone long enough and they’ll deliver 15 divisions of two teams each. Then we can have even more playoff games.

What was so bad about two divisions?

What was so bad about one postseason series?