I always knew the Orioles whether we faced them in the ALCS or in the Postseason that they were too inexperience.
This came across my FB feed. A Braves fan whining about the new MLB postseason system. https://www.facebook.com/BravesToma...jemzhrC8ffvPGi4vC7NoVl1eRkdaVr&__tn__=-UC,P-R The new playoff format is a failure Two years ago the MLB came up with one of its dumbest ideas it’s ever had, restructuring the playoffs, adding another Wild Card team, adding a whole Wild Card round, and giving a whole round off for the top 4 teams in baseball. Last year the Braves and the Dodgers were both quick outs, losing in 4 games. The Yankees escaped against the Guardians, and the Astros swept the Mariners, good for them. In 2023, the playoff format has looked even worse, at least to me, I’m a Braves fan. Remember that the goal of moving the NLDS was to give an advantage to the top 4 teams in baseball. And there is a pile of evidence growing to show that it’s the exact opposite. And good teams should be extremely upset, because it holds the possibility to waste great regular seasons on a contextual dice roll of a series. For one, I hate the additional Wild Card team. If you’re the 6th best team in in the National League, I don’t believe you earned a playoff spot. And I think that because I’ve seen the Phillies go 7-14 for the last 3 weeks of 2022. And now I’ve seen the Marlins, Diamondbacks and Cubs all play uninspired baseball at the end of the regular season, two of them made the playoffs. It wasn’t a sprint to the finish, it was the only teams not to collapse. The playoff expansion didn’t create better baseball. Now every sport is expanding their postseason. It’s a win for everyone, it keeps 5 or 6 more fanbases invested in the sport for and extra month or two. There’s just one difference. A football game is a football game is a football game. A 7 game basketball series is a same no matter what. The MLB has different rules for every series. You can win 99 games and lose your division and be playing in a 3 game series like the Rays and be out quick. You can win 87 games, finish 3rd in your division, and catch your groove in the Wild Card round and win the NL, like the Phillies. And most importantly, you can win 100 games, then the MLB will force you to find something to do for a period longer than the All-Star break, then force you to fight for your life in a 5 game series against a team that already won a playoff series. Every team has a unique challenge to overcome that is created by the playoff system. Is the problem not obvious? The early portion of playoffs has nothing to do with who the best teams are. Winning in this postseason format has everything to do with how your place in the playoff system agrees with your roster and how you’re playing. Maybe the Astros are really good at it. They’re the exception, not the rule. If the Braves finished the season with 104 wins, had 1 day off, then started a 5 game series and lost, I would only have qualms against the team, because it’s the same for everyone. But this is not the same for everyone. The Braves and the Dodgers are finding the deck stacked against them for the second year in a row, with no time to find themselves after an unprecedented rest period. Taking 5 days off would be hard to start back up from if everyone were doing it. But that’s not the case. You have to come back from unusually long rest, while your opponent has been playing playoff baseball. It’s contrived, it’s not normal baseball. It’s certainly not our best against their best. We did that for 162 games and we’re 14 games better than them. 8-5 head to head. We took 3 of 4 in their house to win the division, and that was normal baseball. This is not. Even if the Braves find a way to win, it’s because we survived this assault from the NLDS rules. We’re not just overcoming another team, we’re overcoming the circumstance. Why don’t we ask the Phillies if they’d rather have played the Marlins or played sim games for 5 days? It was a horrible decision from the MLB to change the playoff format to this, and the Braves and Dodgers have been good sports about it to this point, but they need to light Rob Manfred up. Because the Braves and Dodgers have no intention of not winning 100 plus games every year. And if the MLB does not remedy this problem they are punishing two of its most well run franchises. And I’m especially mad because I feel like the Braves can’t help but win 100+ games next year, and we’ll find ourselves in the exact same miserable circumstance. It means if we lose, Braves fans are going to have to find a way to enjoy another 100 win season in 2024, knowing we’re just crossing our fingers for one miserable week in October where we try to find a different way to win a short series. If the Braves lost a 7 game series to another team, there would be nothing to talk about other than who played better baseball. But that’s not what this is. This is about whose playoff circumstances benefited them more. These rules are trash. Playoff baseball should be about baseball, not scheduling. And you can tell that baseball’s best teams are not able to play baseball like normal because they’re trying to overcome scheduling. Even if all the top teams advance, the MLB needs to change the rules. It was a bad idea from the beginning, and they shouldn’t be putting this additional burden every year on its perennial contenders.
I tend to agree, generally. I don't like the idea of adding MORE playoff teams. You play 162 games because small sample sizes in baseball tell you very little to nothing...playoff spots are to be EARNED if you're playing 162 games. I'm not saying to go back to 1986...where 4 teams total make the playoffs (2 in each league)...but cheapening playoff spots is, imo, not a good idea. I say the same about the NBA, generally. You don't need an 82 game season if you're going to let more teams into the playoffs than you exclude. I'm fine with the number of teams in the playoffs...just think regular season games would be WAY more meaningful if you didn't have 82 of them. But basketball lends itself well to "tournament play." Baseball, on the other hand....
I see your point but I would personally go the other way and reduce the number of regular season games. Maybe it's because I live in Minnesota now but there really isn't much reason to be seeing games with snow flurries falling in March or for the playoffs to go into November. I also think if the Rangers had won that last game any Stros fan would not have been upset if the Stros got in as the 6th team in the AL.
I get that, and there are a lot of people will agree with you. Personally I think baseball is too much of a coin flip prone to statistical oddities for that if the goal is to determine who the best team in the league was in any given year.
I argued this last year, in defense of (mostly) Dodger fans upset with the formatting: it really does reduce the postseason down to a crapshoot. Astros fans rejected the idea because the format very obviously wasn't a factor - but I think this year, you may hear more of them jump on board as they try to navigate longer postseason with a team nowhere deep as ones from years past. For me, the ideal format is: seeds 1 & 2 earn byes to the LCS; seeds 3-6 play five-game LDS; return the one-game tiebreaker to determine division/playoff teams.
