The 2001 A's would've hated this new playoff system.
It’s time to take a little break from the paired-pitching analysis and replacement-level player dissection that is the 2012 Rockies to discuss the second wild card. I’ve hated the idea since before it became a reality, back when Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated first brought it up. To be fair, it wasn’t his idea, but one that he took from Steve Hirdt of the Elias Sports Bureau and ran with. And boy did he ever run with it. I’m not a big fan of Verducci, but of all the inane things he’s said or written, this year’s second wild card, or Wilder Card, is the worst.
(Note: Kevin Kroh’s recent column “See No Evil, Hear No Evil” named the second wild card “The Wilder Card.” I love this and I’m going to use it whenever possible. It’s much catchier than constantly saying “The second wild card.” Mr. Kroh, you are a genius.)
On September 7, 2010, Verducci published a column called “How to Fix MLB’s Playoff System”. Just by reading the title, you can see how presumptuous Verducci is. Until his column, I couldn’t recall a single person (outside of the hardcore traditionalists who hate the wild card on general principles) complaining about the baseball playoffs or how teams made the playoffs. There simply wasn’t anything to fix. Though he’s never said it outright, read enough of Verducci’s columns and it becomes painfully clear that he hates the wild card and hates it even more when the wild card wins the World Series (something that has only happened 5 times in 17 years). In his head and his words, the wild card teams are inferior to division winners and don’t deserve to win. He says, “Second-place teams face a more difficult road to the World Series than a division winner. That should be obvious, but it’s not the case now.”
The problem with this thinking is that he’s placing an undeserved value on winning a division – an arbitrary grouping of teams based solely on geography. What’s more is that not all of the divisions have the same number of teams, so the odds of making the playoffs vary depending on the division. Now, toss in the fact that the wild card must beat the remainder of its entire league (10 teams in the AL and 12 in the NL) and you can see that Verducci is clearly not doing the math. However, the strongest evidence is in the win-loss records going back to the beginning of the wild card era (1995).
Of the 34 wild card winners since 1995, only 11 of them had the worst record of their league’s playoff entrants. In other words, if you took away divisions and just went by record, less than one third of the wild cards would be last among playoff entrants. What’s more, 10 times did a division winner finish tied with or worse than a team that didn’t even make the playoffs; the worst example being the 2008 Dodgers who finished with the eighth best record in the NL. I repeat, EIGHTH. With this information, it’s obvious that the wild card does not deserve to be handicapped.
Another argument is that adding a second wild card will add excitement to the playoff races. But is that even true? In 2010, Verducci says that four of the eight playoff spots are all but locked up, even though there are still 25 games or so left for each team. For one thing, that means at least eight teams were still in contention – not too shabby. Okay, so has the new system improved this? As of September 20, 2012, with about 14 games left, eight of the ten spots are all but locked up and only one of the six divisions features two playoff bound teams within less than 3 games of the division lead. Barring any epic collapses, Washington, Cincinnati, San Francisco, and Texas will win their divisions, Atlanta and Oakland will win wild cards, and Baltimore and the Yankees will split a wild card and division win. That leaves Detroit and the White Sox fighting for their division and St. Louis with a 2.5 game lead for the other wild card. If we look at teams that still have a realistic chance of catching a current playoff team, plus those current teams, we have St. Louis, Milwaukee, and the Dodgers in one race, and Chicago and Detroit in the other – or in other words five teams. Toss in the Baltimore-Yankees battle and we still only get to seven teams. If we get a little more generous, we can include Texas and Oakland’s division race, with Oakland 3.5 games back. With ten spots instead of eight, this is hardly an improvement.
In all fairness, if we look at this season without the Wilder Card there are fewer remaining races, the NL would be completely settled, but the AL would feature a gruesome three-way battle between Oakland, Baltimore, and the Yankees battling for two spots. The Wilder Card has robbed us of that race since all three teams should make the playoffs, while Oakland is all but assured a wild card. And as much as we’ll hear that it worked for the NL, do we really care that much about three slightly-better-than-average teams jockeying for the NL Wilder Card?
So, why do I hate the Wilder Card so much?
- First – it removes importance from the regular season. This is the number one problem with the NHL and NBA, but the one-game playoff is even worse. Baseball is the one sport where not all of the players play in each game, specifically the pitchers. The reason for playing a series of games is to make one team defeat the other team’s entire arsenal, removing the chance that a single pitcher kills your season by having one bad day.
- Second – it forces two teams to play that most likely finished with different records during the season. If this were in place in 2001, the 102-win A’s (the second best record in both leagues) are forced to play the 85-win Twins, a team that finished seventeen games behind the A’s, while the inferior Yankees (95 wins) and Indians (91 wins) enjoy their geographical good luck. Does anyone really believe that’s a fair set up?
- Third – the reason just stated gets repeated more than two-thirds of the time, going forward. If we’re going to handicap so-called undeserving playoff teams, it should be the teams that played the worst, regardless of division standings.
- Fourth – it’s going to happen this year in the AL and potentially in the NL. In the AL, the White Sox are all but guaranteed to finish with a worse record than both wild cards and possibly the Angels, whom they are tied with, a non-playoff team. In the NL, the Braves are just one game behind the Giants for the third best record. Fair, my ass.
- Fifth – what happens if the Yankees end up losing the playoff game? Does anyone really believe Yankees fans, not to mention the franchise, aren’t going to be pissed off when they realize the AL Central winner gets a free pass to the divisional round even though they were worse than the Yankees? Not to mention the money the franchise loses in lost playoff games and ratings baseball loses for the same reason. As much as people love and hate the Yankees, everyone accepts that baseball wants them in the playoffs. The moment they are the victims of this unjust setup, the baseball world is going to explode. And, yes, I’m openly rooting for this to happen just to see the aftermath.
The point of all my rambling is that the Wilder Card will turn out to be just as big a mistake as tying home field advantage in the World Series to the winner of the All-Star game. It takes away the spontaneous and rare nature of the one-game playoff games by forcing two of them every year and people are going to tire quickly of superior teams losing to lesser teams and still finishing with better records. If they really wanted to create a fair system, they would do away with divisions and just take the top four teams from each league for the playoffs. Instead, they created a way for baseball to rake in more money (on top of billions already) while cheapening the season and potentially leading to even more complaining by writers like Verducci when a Wilder Card team inevitably wins a World Series. Let’s all hope it happens this year.
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7 comments
Simone
September 22, 2012 at 10:26 PM (UTC -6)
At this rate…they could have 12 teams from each league make the playoffs…and the Rockies still wouldn’t be close. The countdown to 100 losses continues, only 7 more to go.
Kevin Kroh
September 23, 2012 at 6:07 AM (UTC -6)
I tip my cap to you, sir, but I’m personally digging this new Wilder Card quite a bit.
We’re seeing some excellent baseball right now, played by a greater number of teams, most of them motivated by the hope (however faint) of clawing their way into the playoffs, which I would argue makes for higher-quality games down the stretch across the entire mlb. Your team is either in the hunt, or playing the role of spoiler, so it’s still exciting for most fans to follow to the bitter end of the long season.
Imagine if Philly or Milwaukee or even the D-Bags managed to sneak into the playoffs after wallowing in mediocrity all season. This wouldn’t be such a bad thing, even if that team won the WS. To see a less-than-spectacular club struggle for most of the season only figure it all out in September would undoubtedly motivate teams for next year to stay optimistic and play hard for the entire season, no matter how bleak things look by the All-Star break.
This affects everything from trade-deadline strategies to late-Sept. call-ups, and nothing is taken for granted in the standings. All teams hovering around .500 in August are only one explosive winning streak away from becoming playoff-relevant (ROCKIES in 07!)
Each divisional race now becomes uniquely different, too.
Boston would love to knock off Baltimore after what the O’s did to the Bo-Sox last season. And you can’t count out those pesky Rays — they’re starting to put up some crooked offensive numbers, and with that pitching, watch out! And I would love to see that scenario you pointed out with the Yankees happen. On the other hand, three teams from the AL East could potentially go to the playoffs, which would be crazy.
In the AL Central, winning the division means everything. The 2nd place team probably won’t get the Wilder Card.
And the Halos still have more than a prayer at catching the A’s. It feels like Oakland and Baltimore are riding an impossible wave which might come crashing down any day now. It’s a long shot, but three of the four teams in the AL West could all find themselves in the playoffs — another crazy scenario that makes me laugh.
In the NL, even the Phillies and D-Bags are playing with playoff-motivated purpose. The Cards seem to always toughen up down the stretch, but it’d be fun to see the champs get a taste of their own medicine and watch the Brewers pass them by.
This Wilder Card has clearly helped resurrect baseball interest in Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Washington, Oakland, and south-side Chicago (although it looks grim for the Buccos at this point), which must be great for all those fans.
All of this encourages both the teams and the fans to HANG IN THERE for the long haul as we all anticipate a playoff atmosphere for most of September, every year from here on out. There’s nothing worse than realizing your team is totally irrelevant as early as July, with no hope of attaining anything in the second-half, still with 80 games to play.
With at least one interleague game to be played every day next season, and the psychological/physical affects of this Wilder Card yet to be seen, it will be exciting to see what this new era of more inclusive, competitive, and bat-shit crazy baseball has to offer. No matter how much the new system seems to be anti-meritocratic, illogical, or anti-traditional, it has definitely channeled some new and welcomed energy into this season.
Kevin Jordan
September 24, 2012 at 7:36 PM (UTC -6)
You’re definitely correct in that there is still good baseball going on, mostly through extra contending teams not playing September call-ups nearly as much. But, inclusion is only good to a point and is how we end up with little leagues that don’t keep score and trophies for everyone. Nobody outside of Seattle was happy to see the 7-9 Seahawks in the playoffs in 2010 (I know they were a division winner, which further proves my point that divisions are absurd, especially 4-team divisions) and it’s embarrassing in the NBA and NHL when teams make the playoffs while finishing below .500. I do not want baseball to end up like that (they already got close with the 83-win Cardinals in 2006) and I really don’t want to see very good wild card teams knocked out due to one bad game (if that makes me an elitist, I’ll wear it with pride).
Here’s a scenario I don’t want to see happen: The Braves pitch Tim Hudson in the wild card playoff and lose and we don’t get to see Chipper Jones last playoff run or Kris Medlen continue his insane season.
This format hasn’t really changed anything as far as comebacks and tank jobs, it just shifts who it is and reduces the severity. You ask us to imagine if Philly or Milwaukee or Arizona sneak in (not terribly exciting since all 3 of those teams won their divisions last year), but we’ve already seen that multiple times the last few seasons (’07 Rockies, ’07 Phillies, ’11 Rays, ’11 Cardinals immediately come to mind). With this new format, last year’s epic finish would not have happened because Boston and Atlanta would have been playing in the one-game playoff regardless of their collapses. We also may not have even noticed their swoons since both of them still would have finished 3-4 games ahead of the next teams in the standings.
My main issues are with the inequity of who has to play in this one-game playoff and the fact that it is only one game. If it was a three game series, I’d have less of a problem with it because that would eliminate a lot of the luck involved in any given game. After a couple of mediocre Wilder Cards knock off a superior Wild Card team in the one-game playoff, we will see one of three things happen. They’ll go back to the way things were, they’ll make it a 3-game series, or they will add 1-3 more playoff spots and reduce the regular season back to 154 games. My bet is on the third, since neither the owners or players will give back the money generated by this game (though giving back eight games in the regular season is a stretch, too). I’d even be mostly okay with it if they scrapped divisions and made the 4th and 5th place teams duke it out.
I’ll leave everyone with this question: everyone remembers epic collapses in baseball; when was the last epic collapse in the NFL, NBA, or NHL? (And even if we come up with any, do they even come close to the chicken-beer-video game Red Sox?)
JD
September 25, 2012 at 12:01 PM (UTC -6)
Exactly. There is an “epic playoff race” for the last spot, whatever the last spot is. And now we start to see more good teams resting starters late, skewing the schedule and screwing themselves up.
Why not just let all 30 teams into the playoffs and make the season all about seeding?
JD
September 24, 2012 at 8:33 AM (UTC -6)
A one-game playoff is far more stupid in baseball than in other sports because baseball has a starting rotation. You’re supposed to need five pitchers to win over the long run. The playoffs already suck because with all the off-day a team with three great starters and two awful ones beats a team with five pretty good ones, even though the second team might be better overall. Now we’re throwing one-game playoffs in there, so that the total fluke of rotation alignments can decide seasons.
I liked baseball and college football because their regular seasons mattered, unlike sports where half the league makes the playoffs. I want the champion to be the team that performs over the course of the year, not the team that sneaks in with a .500 record, then gets hot while other teams have injured stars. Timing and flukes shouldn’t decide championships. Consistent winning should.
Baseball is abandoning that.
TroyF
September 24, 2012 at 8:39 AM (UTC -6)
Stop it. Really, just stop it. What is the wilder card really about? It’s about two things.
1) Money. You think those two one game playoffs won’t get ridiculous ratings?
2) It’s for the owners to be able to tell their fans they made or contended for the playoffs. Heck, the Padres are likely to finish within 10 games of a wild card spot and they are 7 games below .500. Think about that for a second. You think they won’t use that in marketing for next year? Of course they will.
Very rarely are moves made “for the good of the game” They are made for revenue purposes. Either marketing or ratings. Personally? I don’t care. 162 games is a long journey, but different teams are built for the playoffs. The Braves went to 200 straight playoffs and came away with one title and that was with only one wild card.. From 1995 to 2010, the best team in the regular season wins less than 1 in 5 World Series. With only one playoff series, the best team won the title 28% of the time.
The playoffs are and always have been a crapshoot. They always will be. The wilder card will not change that and if the Yankees get beat by the A’s in a wild card, it will not send anything spiraling out of control. It’s here to stay. Sorry.
Kevin Jordan
September 26, 2012 at 5:51 PM (UTC -6)
Nobody is arguing the money point. Of course that’s why they did it. But, mark my words, a couple of bad beats (as I mentioned above) and we will see another playoff expansion. The Wilder Card is the just the first step – why else would they create a system that is so blatantly unfair?