MLB response to tanking: more playoff teams?

[OsFanSinceThe80s]

[ExileAngelos]

Current format is fine.  Wild Card is perfect.  It penalizes teams for not winning division and it keeps more teams alive towards the end of the season.  It is also a thrilling one game hold your nuts every pitch.  

Does anyone remember before going to one game WC format what the big complaint was?  It was the fact there was no difference between winning your division and winning the wild card.  What this new abortion of a system does is essentially create one division winner and six wild cards per league.  We are back where we were before with no difference between division winner and wild cards.  

Great job Manfred you freaking clown.  I would much rather go back to the old seven team divisions with four post season births.  Heck I would even prefer how they do it in the Premier League where the best record simply is the champion vs this absolute garbage.  

[atomic]

7 minutes ago, ExileAngelos said:

Current format is fine.  Wild Card is perfect.  It penalizes teams for not winning division and it keeps more teams alive towards the end of the season.  It is also a thrilling one game hold your nuts every pitch.  

Does anyone remember before going to one game WC format what the big complaint was?  It was the fact there was no difference between winning your division and winning the wild card.  What this new abortion of a system does is essentially create one division winner and six wild cards per league.  We are back where we were before with no difference between division winner and wild cards.  

Great job Manfred you freaking clown.  I would much rather go back to the old seven team divisions with four post season births.  Heck I would even prefer how they do it in the Premier League where the best record simply is the champion vs this absolute garbage.  

I think the league is doing everything they can to ruin the game.  I am a lifetime baseball fan who is ready to give up on the sport. Manfred needs to go.  Attendance will drop again next year. the sport is going to die without new leadership.
 

[Just Regular]

All we'd need to manage is a soft 7th in the 2022 AL, and then whichever of the Yankees/White Sox loses the 1st round bye by 106-105 wins, would snap us up as the easiest wildcard opponent for three games at their place.

We can take the Jays, Red Sox, Indians, Tigers, Royals, Mariners, Rangers and some California AL West team that year, right?

[Philip]

 I haven’t read the other comments yet, but this commissioner is such a complete disaster I cannot imagine that he hasn’t been quietly killed yet. I cannot fathom how a majority of the owners think he is a good thing for baseball. Every single move he has made has been bad.The worst was his reaction to the cheating scandal.

He cannot go soon enough, Hell, I’d even be willing to replace him with Dan.

[sportsfan8703]

I like expanding the playoffs. BOS and NYY have both been in the top 2-3 of payroll for the last 20 years. That’s tough for us to compete against every year. That usually means we’re playing for the WC2 at best. During our run, we were the WC2 two of the three times we made the playoffs. 
 

This adds one extra spot in each league, and eliminates the 1 game WC round. I love it. 

[Just Regular]

I gather one big point of this is to create super team competition when the elites are spread across divisions.  The current setup is fine if the Dodgers have a down year, and have to beat the Rockies the last weekend to stay out of the wildcard game, or the Red Sox and Yankees are both great, but the potential for the whole 162 to run as 6-month extended spring training would be less in this setup.

Last year maybe the Yankees chase the Astros harder for that bye.  Then the reality TV angle kicks in when they fall short, and the drama becomes...

107 Houston

Opening Round hosts:

103 New York

101 Minnesota

97 Oakland

Opening Round visitors:

96 Tampa

93 Cleveland

84 Boston

....on the Night of 162, will the Yankees really pick Mookie and the Red Sox?

I do like the 3-game series in one city texture.

[$Greatness$]

13 hours ago, PaulFolk said:

No, they'd be choosing their opponents in the first round. The top division winner (#1 seed) would get a bye, as you said. The second best division winner (#2 seed) would choose its wild card opponent first (choosing from among the #5, #6, and #7 seeds). Then the third best division winner (#3 seed) would choose its wild card opponent. Then the top wild card team (the #4 seed) would play whichever wild card team is left over.

Either way, it's stupid.

Super stupid. But it will be funny to see a team handpick their opponent and lose. The Cowboys did that to the Ravens to close out their old stadium and got dealt with. But I'm not a fan of this proposed playoff goofiness.

[glenn__davis]

7 hours ago, ExileAngelos said:

Current format is fine.  Wild Card is perfect.  It penalizes teams for not winning division and it keeps more teams alive towards the end of the season.  It is also a thrilling one game hold your nuts every pitch.  

Does anyone remember before going to one game WC format what the big complaint was?  It was the fact there was no difference between winning your division and winning the wild card.  What this new abortion of a system does is essentially create one division winner and six wild cards per league.  We are back where we were before with no difference between division winner and wild cards.  

Great job Manfred you freaking clown.  I would much rather go back to the old seven team divisions with four post season births.  Heck I would even prefer how they do it in the Premier League where the best record simply is the champion vs this absolute garbage.  

Agreed - I'd say the current format is about perfect actually.  I love the 1-game wildcard, it was about the only good thing Bud Selig did.  

[glenn__davis]

2 minutes ago, $Greatness$ said:

Super stupid. But it will be funny to see a team handpick their opponent and lose. The Cowboys did that to the Ravens to close out their old stadium and got dealt with. 

It would be funny maybe like the first 1 or 2 times.  But it would happen so frequently that it would lose its luster.  A baseball playoff series is essentially a coin toss.  

[Mr. Chewbacca Jr.]

7 hours ago, Philip said:

 I haven’t read the other comments yet, but this commissioner is such a complete disaster I cannot imagine that he hasn’t been quietly killed yet. I cannot fathom how a majority of the owners think he is a good thing for baseball. Every single move he has made has been bad.The worst was his reaction to the cheating scandal.

He cannot go soon enough, Hell, I’d even be willing to replace him with Dan.

[Frobby]

8 hours ago, atomic said:

I think the league is doing everything they can to ruin the game.  I am a lifetime baseball fan who is ready to give up on the sport. Manfred needs to go.  Attendance will drop again next year. the sport is going to die without new leadership.
 

 

7 hours ago, Philip said:

 I haven’t read the other comments yet, but this commissioner is such a complete disaster I cannot imagine that he hasn’t been quietly killed yet. I cannot fathom how a majority of the owners think he is a good thing for baseball. Every single move he has made has been bad.The worst was his reaction to the cheating scandal.

He cannot go soon enough, Hell, I’d even be willing to replace him with Dan.

You guys are hilarious.   Per Forbes, the average value of a major league team has increased from $1.2 bb to $1.78 bb in Msnfred’s first four years in office.    He’s not going anywhere.   

[Camden_yardbird]

I am definitely for eliminating the 1 game wildcard.  It can be exciting but is kind of like your boss saying "Congratulations for landing that multimillion dollar contract for the company, as a bonus I am going to give you a half of a day off."

If baseball wants to fix tanking, it has to fix its Revenue sharing problem first and foremost. 

Rob Manfred want to keep thinking his products issues are surface related.  Hype, Speed of Play, Etc, when the real truth is major league baseball has some serious structural issues regarding balance and speed of turnaround of a tanking team.

Football succeeds because of a balanced schedule, a salary cap, player marketing, and because a team can go into a rebuild and emerge two years later as a Super Bowl team.

Basketball has it's own issues but they get the player marketing right. 

[DrungoHazewood]

They need to get creative.  Every North American sports league gets all their ideas from slightly tweaking what they've done for the past 30, 50, 100 years.

I think they should shrink the playoffs.  The current playoffs are about crowning a champion, right?  They've already made it so that the best team in baseball has less than a 1-in-3 chance of winning the Series on the first day of October.  Why further dilute that?  Why continue to pretend that it's greater to win a few short series in October than it is to have a team that wins over six-plus months? (I know why - they can't fix gross revenue imbalances, so they randomize the World Series champ by adding rounds of playoffs that necessarily don't reflect organizational quality so much as luck.)

They need to give teams something else to play for.  Why do teams tank? Because they get better picks, have a lower payroll, and even if they try they have essentially no chance of winning the single trophy baseball gives out.  So give them another opportunity.  Maybe set up a League Cup, where every few weeks you play a in-League series that serves as a secondary competition with tangible, sizable monetary or payroll or roster space or (something) award to the winner, along with a big trophy.  Maybe you have a competition where the bottom 8 or 10 teams from last year play teams from the Mexican League in some kind of tournament, with a 3-game series played once or twice a month, and a championship happening at the same time as the divisional playoffs.

Perhaps instead of contracting a bunch of mid- or low-tier minor league teams, turn AAA into an independent league that's still loosely affiliated with MLB.  Everyone over 26 still on a AAA roster at the end of the year is free to sign with any other AAA team.  I'm making this up on the fly... but maybe you could do promotion/relegation with this league, maybe you have a competition between this and the lower-tier MLB teams.  

I know... this is new and different and weird and I'm sure the collective power of baseball fans can come up with 6,994 reasons why this will never work and I'm a fool for suggesting it.  Then come up with your own idea on how to incentivize teams without realistic hope to try.  Whatever MLB has come up with in the last 125 years hasn't worked.

The entire problem is baseball teams in a modern revenue environment often/usually take years and years to rebuild from a down period, and they literally have almost no incentive to win during that time.  Give them something to play for.

[DrungoHazewood]

8 hours ago, atomic said:

I think the league is doing everything they can to ruin the game.  I am a lifetime baseball fan who is ready to give up on the sport. Manfred needs to go.  Attendance will drop again next year. the sport is going to die without new leadership.

But you're the kind of person who thinks anyone in charge of anything is dumber than a bag of rocks.  You viscerally hate Mike Elias, you were no big fan of Duquette, you hate Manfred.  I'm guessing you didn't like Bud (who did?).  

How would commissioner Atomic fix all that ails baseball?