6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog

I haven't said much about this since I've been more interested in following the postseason than tinkering with it, but that said, my friend Rich Lederer has recently published a pair of articles regarding an old bête noir of his, what he perceives to be the unfairness of the postseason. In the first article, he starts by informing us of Billy Beane's perceived wisdom about the postseason, that is, once a team gets in, it's a crapshoot.

What were they thinking when they came up with the idea of the wild card? After a 162-game season, teams that did not win their division get another chance to win their league and win the World Series? What a country! Step right up! Everybody's a winner. Give everybody a participation trophy while we're at it. Nobody goes home a loser. (I can hear Jay Stewart now, telling the Tampa Bay Devil Rays that their consolation prize is the #1 pick in the June draft.)

The bottom line is that the postseason is no longer what it once was. Teams no longer play 154 or 162 games to determine who wins the pennant and goes to the World Series. Today, teams play nearly every day for six months so baseball can determine which EIGHT teams make the playoffs, including two clubs that weren't even good enough to beat out teams in their own division!

As a result of this more egalitarian system, the best teams no longer wind up in the World Series. In fact, wild cards have advanced to the Fall Classic in each of the past four years and five of the last six. The wild cards even won three championships in a row, including one in which both teams made it in through the back door.

Noting in passing the fact that the 2002 Angels had the best Pythagorean regular season record that year, there's something else here that I find fundamentally unsavory about this line of reasoning, and that is the assertion that because the postseason has elements of luck involved in it that this should be a justification for the kind of broad monkeywrenching presented in Designated Hitter Bruce Regal's proposal. He starts his argument with the dubious proposition that "There seems to be a pretty general consensus among sabermetric folks that baseball's current system of post-season eligibility and play is seriously flawed." As commenter APing noted in the comments, just because he posits such a concensus does not mean it exists in fact. Regal goes on with his proposal:

I propose that instead of going directly to a four-team tournament, each of the four divisions first have a "Challenge Round" in which the second place team in each division would have an opportunity to catch the first place team in a series of head-to-head games. In effect, the regular season would be extended for up to another 6 games between the first and second place teams, until one or the other clinches the division. If they end up tied at the end of 6 games, they play a seventh game in the form of a one-game playoff. To provide a few examples of how this system would work, suppose divisions ended as they did in 2006. In a Challenge Round, Anaheim (second place, four games behind) would play Oakland needing six wins in seven games; Minnesota (first place) and Detroit (one game behind) would play, with the Tigers needing four wins in six games; and LA and San Diego (who tied for first) would play a full best of seven game Challenge Round series.

Until his retirement ceremonies brought this to the fore, I was fully unaware that Diamondbacks fans had nicknamed Luis Gonzalez "Mr. November" for his 2001 World Series bloop that won the critical game 7, which brings up an important point: do we really want the postseason to drag into November every season? Guarantee one playoff series of seven games among the top two teams in each division (now only two per league under his new system) and you might just have that.

I suppose purists might just take this to its logical conclusion and get rid of divisions altogether, and thus we would have been subjected dull Yankees-somebody postseasons six of the last ten years. Going even further, we might as well get rid of those pesky expansion teams that caused the whole division mess in the first place. Los Angeles or Anaheim or wherever didn't really need a second team, the Devil Rays have never seen a major league roster, and Gothamites would hardly miss the Mets were that team to disappear. We could say similar things about the Royals, Rockies, Diamondbacks, Nationals, Blue Jays, Brewers, Padres, Mariners, Rangers, and Marlins. See? This is easy.

But all this misses perhaps a larger point: if indeed the postseason is a crapshoot, let's stop trying to be scientific about it. After all, Regal's changes still suffer from the small sample size problem, too; so, why not get rid of the postseason altogether? If indeed it means nothing, just call the two winners of each league the two best in baseball and have done with it. Since I don't believe he really means quite what he says here, I have to believe, as with Jonathan Swift's Modest Proposal, it's not being offered seriously — or if it is, it lacks the courage of its convictions.

Update: More on this from David Pinto.