I Fixed Baseball

[metsmarathon]

the short serieses are what really fucks things up. but long serieses AND top-seed byes fuck things up even more. ...or at least as much. Wrong wrong wrongedy wrong! We need MORE short series for the 83- and 86-win teams. Not even a series. The two (or four) lowest seeded teams play one game to see who gets into the next round. Unfair? You dont like it? Tough--win more games in the regular season. The winners of the one game WC gets to play three games at the next-seeded teams' park, and the winner there gets to play (on the road) a team that's had a BYE for the past few days. 1, 3, 5, 7 games, all on the road for the lowest seeded team. The plural of "series" btw is "series." Like "deer" and "deer."

except that every time a team sweeps their own series and loses the next, there's a fuck-ton of handwringing about them going cold from too many days off. it's actually among the reasons why they changed the schedule in 7 game serieses, aside from too many rest days not looking like real baseball. it was also stated as a concern going into this off season for the top seeds to be sitting around waiting for their games. you go from playing every day to sitting on your ass for a week. you lose the edge, or so the worry goes.



i actually REALLY liked the old format, where the two wildcard winners would face off in a winner-take-all one game play-in. i thought it perfectly rewarded the best teams while punishing the lower seeds with the enhanced cruelties of fate.



but, that still doesn't appear to sufficiently reward the top seeds, or so says the handwringing over the NL playoff results thus far. so if having too few of the top seeds make it past the first round is indeed a problem, this is one way to fix it. that i have already stated that i hate. so there.



and finally, i should think that in my, what, twenty years of posting on mets boards, that any instruction on the proper spelling of a word, or correct grammatical semantical usage, is either unnecessary or completely wasted on me. i'm either irredeeemably illiterate, or just stubbornly make awful stylistic choices because i think it makes me look cool but mostly just makes me seem illiterate but honestly i don't give a shit because i'm stubborn and too heavily invested in my style to ever change and i'm going to go cry now because i'm a terrible person who thought it would be fun to write serieses instead of series because life it too painfully dull to not write deers and meese instead of deer and moose when tapping out uncapitalized musings over baseball errata and oh my god what am i even doing here when i could be curing cancer and pressing the shift key more regularly i'm sorry i'm so so sorry.

[Frayed Knot]

My final input on the topic:



- the '73 Mets won their division. THAT gets them into the playoffs. If wins alone is going to be the standard then get rid of divisions.



- I'm perfectly willing to discuss Byes and lengths of rounds and so on, although do keep in mind that baseball has weather issues that other sports don't so can't go on for 10-12 (or 30) weeks like the NBA. What I DON'T WANT is plumbing the depths of mediocrities to see how many of them we can cram into a tourney because even though they weren't actually good enough to win anything it might hurt their feelings if they were left out and orange slices and participation trophies just aren't enticing enough. The fact that the Nationals COULD win the WS this year with a run no one knew they had in them is a lousy reason to include them in the playoffs, and that goes for whoever the 10th thru 16th best teams were too.

Edited October 21, 2022 by Guest

[roger_that]

"a fuck-ton of handwringing" is a good phrase. I'd add "from ignorant jackasses whose next real thought will be their first one."



All you have to do see the value of BYEs, as I've said before, is to give teams the choice: you can rest for four or five days, or you can play for your lives and, if you lose, go home. Which choice will teams take 100% of the time?



So why are we even discussing "BYEs: Good or Bad?" any more? Because of ignorant jackasses? Let 'em bray.



Serieseses.

[metsmarathon]

I love a plurality of serieseseses. Gimme all the series of series I can handle.



There is a legit argument that rest can work against baseball players who are used to playing every day. I guess I shouldn't listen to the current and former players and executives who bring it up as a possible concern.



Give the top seeds two weeks off. They'll be so crazy fresh nobody could possibly beat them.



Let's them take the whole next season off. Advance directly to the next years World Series.



Sigh.



Silly me for considering the affect on a player who is used to playing every day, for whom timing and rhythm and pattern and process is vitally important, and throwing that all right out the window when the games matter most.



Silly me for also saying outright that I don't particularly care for my proposal but suggest only that it may be a way to better effect the desired outcome of Better teams advancing further.



Byes. Byes for everyone. Top seeds get two rounds of byes. Maybe even three. Four perhaps.



When players come back from the dl, they often need to spend time getting back into game action. But in the playoffs, make em sit as long as possible. That's what's best.



When relievers don't pitch in game action for a week, we worry if they'll be ready to go.



But sure. No reason at all to think that a bye might have a negative effect.



Byes get your better teams that one round deeper into the playoffs. Yes. But are they actually good for those teams, aside from increasing their odds of getting only exactly that far? Does taking the week off make that team better able to play at a high level, or can it be a posssible detriment?



Bray tell.

[Ceetar]

From a more realistic front, I think given that the teams are raking in money via TV contracts, they might actually be open to dropping games from the regular season schedule. MLB (ESPN) wanted to add two MORE teams to the postseason. You could counter that with a shorter season and another/longer playoff series formats, because the money from ESPN probably more than covers the revenue from 4 games.



This is just a logistical thought, nothing to do with quality of competition in the playoffs or anything.

[Ceetar]

=metsmarathon post_id=111720 time=1666382443 user_id=83]




Byes get your better teams that one round deeper into the playoffs. Yes. But are they actually good for those teams, aside from increasing their odds of getting only exactly that far? Does taking the week off make that team better able to play at a high level, or can it be a posssible detriment?

[roger_that]

But are they actually good for those teams, aside from increasing their odds of getting only exactly that far? Does taking the week off make that team better able to play at a high level, or can it be a posssible detriment?

Yes, they're good for those teams.



No, the disadvantages of BYEs (while they exist) are overwhelmingly outweighed by the advantages, even casting aside the value of advancing into the next round uncontested.



It's so clear that BYEs favor the team that gets them that I'm more than slightly puzzled why you want to have this discussion. The teams that get them not only wouldn't trade places with the teams that don't, but they wouldn't even talk or think about turning one down for 3/4th of a second.



Now, it might be worth a theoretical discussion if we were talking about a week off, or ten days off, but we're not. We're talking about three or four days off, with planned, scheduled workout times, extra physical therapies, etc. If we were talking about two weeks off, I'd concede that at some point, your argument would have some merit--but even then, so would mine. There comes a period of time off that your side wins the argument, but we're not nearly there with a three-day or four-day layoff.



Let me give you one example: say a starting pitcher has to suffer a minor injury, a mild sprained ankle that makes him miss a start, and maybe two. Conservatively you put him on a 15-day IL, and have him do some throwing on Day 10, and it turns out that he's fine. So when he comes back on Day 16, rested, uninjured, having thrown 50 or 60 pitches on Day 10, are you thinking "He's going to be a mess. We'd better score 12 or 15 runs today, because he's been resting his arm for two weeks so he's going to get lit up like the 4th of July"?



No, at worst you're expecting him to be his usual self, and you're probably rooting realistically for him to benefit from the rest and relaxation. I certainly am not expecting a disastrous outing.





This topic is only slightly less dumb than, oh, "Is it better for a pitcher to be ahead in the count or behind?" and backing up your side by arguing that often HRs are hit when the pitcher has an 0-2 advantage. Yes, there are occasions that being ahead doesn't work out, but that's still the way the smart money is bet, and suggesting otherwise, or even that it is an open question, doesn't get you a discussion but rather a puzzled look and the question "Are you OK?"





.

.

[metsmarathon]

having trouble finding data one way or another. sabermetricians seem to study every little detail they can find, but little is done looking into byes and how they affect team performances.



if byes were of benefit, or at least neutral, then one would expect to find that a team that has a bye would have a better-than-expected winning percentage against the team without. if byes were a disadvantage, we would expect to find that a team with a bye was disproportionately likely to lose against a team without a bye.



see, i'm just looking here at the chances of a team with or without a bye winning a game at a given round. obviously, having the bye greatly improves your chances of making it to that round, since there's no chance you fall short. i'm looking at how well that bye-d team does once they're there.



the best i could find is https://www.audacy.com/957thegame/sports/san-francisco-giants/why-bye-weeks-are-bad-for-baseball-new-mlb-playoffs-formatthis. not sure how great the source is, but it has numbers at least.

In the 16 times that a team has had a five-day layoff, that team is 7-9 in the ensuing playoff series. Even more interesting however, is how these long layoffs used to be a good thing. From 1995-2005, teams with the five days of no baseball went a perfect 5-0 in the next playoff series. Since 2006 however, those teams are 2-9. ... In fact, having the longer layoff over your next opponent has proven to put teams at a slight disadvantage. In the 27 years of the wild card era prior to this October, there have been 103 postseason series played (This is NOT including the division series played from 1995-2011 as those teams had the same number of days off. It does include the 18 division series played between the top seeded team and the team that won the wild card game starting in 2012). In that time, 15 times have two teams played each other with the same number of rest days before the playoff series started. In the other 88 series, the team with MORE days off has won the ensuing playoff series only 42 times while losing to the team with less rest 46 times. And much like the instances when a team had five or more days off, prior to 2006, the more rested teams actually did better, going 14-16 in those series, with three instances of teams having the same number of days off.

all i'm saying is, it's not completely crazy to think that taking a lot of time off before the playoffs might not be the best preparation. data suggests it. do you have data to suggest otherwise?



I offer a solution that keeps the top teams more engaged, while also drawing in more teams, attempting to appeal to both pulls.



I agree. anecdotally, it makes sense. rest your players. slather them with all the physical therapy in the world. great wonderful massages for everybody. super rest, plenty of sleep.



only that may not be the best preparation when you need to keep your senses keen. you take too much time off and your body starts to think that the fight is over. and it can take a bit to get back to where you were. recent playoff performances indicate this to be true.



i mean, shit, we worry when pitchers who are used to a 5 man rotation suddenly have to perform with 5 days of rest. right? or did i imagine that? do i imagine that everyone (maybe not everyone) bemoans that as being a key factor in the angels struggles despite ohtani - that american pitchers cannot adjust to a 6-man rotation and a japanese pitcher to a 5-man rotation, creatures of habit that they are, that the difference to their established routines is great enough to have noticable effect on their performances. (i think it's that the depth chart has to go one deeper, and you get less sarts out of the good guys, but what do i know - i'm a braying jackass)



but back to the matter at hand. does it hold true that the benefits of rest overweigh the benefits of play? i guess we'll see, won't we.



padres manager bob melvin, https://dodgerblue.com/bob-melvin-padres-benefitted-wild-card-series-pressure-on-dodgers/2022/10/16/of course, seems to think that playing in teh wild card round helped him get past the dodgers.

Padres manager Bob Melvin believes his club's path leading up to the NLDS may have benefited them. “Typically the Wild Card teams are in that position anyway,” Melvin said. “It's always been that way where the teams that get in through via Wild Card are not only playing with intensity up to the end, but they're also playing well to get in. “And there's probably something to be said that when you're playing well and you have a lot of confidence, you get into the postseason, then there isn't as much expectation on you, then maybe that's a pretty good way to go about it. Yet you do have to play another round. “Obviously everybody aspires to win the division, get a little time off. But there might be a little something to that.”

anyway. whatever. i'm done arguing for a playoff format i don't want, and have repeatedly stated that i don't like. y'all think rest helps teams win games. i think the evidence points differently. go mets.

[roger_that]

not sure how sarcastic you're being, mm, in citing Melvin "of course" believing that playing an extra series helped his team win the next round. That's super-positive managerial spin ("I think breaking a leg ultimately helped my player develop running skills he wouldn't have developed otherwise, and I wish more players would break their legs....") but I don't think it's much evidence for anything. It's one thing to look backwards to a series you've won and cite all the (idiotic) reasons you think you won it, but try asking a manager of a losing series if getting to the next series via a BYE would have been preferable. Buck Showalter, for example. "Hey, Buck, did playing SD help or hurt your team this post-season?" Even if the rustiness (speculated on but far from proven) hurt you more than the rest and recovery helped (a very dubious argument in itself), the BYE's assurance of getting to the next round blows the argument away. If rust is 60% and rest is 40%, it's still a no-brainer to take the BYE. And I'm submitting it's a no-brainer to peg rust at 10% and rest at 90%.



Another thought experiment: Let's say the Mets use Edwin Diaz in a normal one-inning save for Saturday's game but get blown out on Sunday, so he sits. Then Monday's a travel day, and Tuesday they blow out their opponent so he sits again. Wednesday night, they have a one run lead in the ninth, so he comes in to save the game.



How worried are you that Diaz has had three straight days of inactivity? Not at all. You're thinking "Perfect. Diaz has had three days to rest, he's not tired or overworked at all. I'm expecting three straight outs here" , right?



Now contrast that with the opposite situation: Diaz has pitched in all three games, with Monday off, and you bring him in for the fourth straight game. This is a scary situation, I think. At some point, and I think the fourth straight game is that point, you're reasonably apprehensive that you're working Diaz too hard, that you just can't keep pitching him that much and not expect his pitching to suffer. It may even be that Buck keeps him out of the game that fourth straight game and uses someone else as the closer that night, and no one blames him even if that someone else gets lit up.



What we're talking about is the same situation x 25. You're relying on a very small sample size of games to make your point.



I'm not saying you're a braying jackass, btw. You're citing anonymous braying jackasses in making your case, but you're not being one. You're just defending a weak case.

[Edgy MD]

The reason that there is little offered by saberbetricians for or against the benefits of byes is mostly because there is no data beyond what we've just witnessed.

[roger_that]

Right. Tiny sample size. So you have to use other parts of your brain

[Ceetar]

Zero teams granted a bye have ever failed to advance out of the first round, and a non-zero teams that HAVEN'T ( think 2022 Mets) been granted a first round bye have failed to advance. Seems pretty conclusive to me.



The percentages for non-bye teams to win that next series would have to be so lopsided that even republicans believed it for it to outweigh that.

[roger_that]

=Ceetar post_id=111757 time=1666452116 user_id=102]
Zero teams granted a bye have ever failed to advance out of the first round, and a non-zero teams that HAVEN'T ( think 2022 Mets) been granted a first round bye have failed to advance. Seems pretty conclusive to me.



The percentages for non-bye teams to win that next series would have to be so lopsided that even republicans believed it for it to outweigh that.

[Ceetar]

you could trade them a win. Braves will play the Padres, but if they advance to the NLCS and play the Mets, they start 1-0.

[roger_that]

Very interesting idea. I like it.

[Benjamin Grimm]

That notion (a ghost win) was proposed during the CBA talks earlier this year. I seem to recall that it was the players who rejected it, but someone here (Gwreck maybe?) recalls that the players suggested it and the owners rejected it. One of us is wrong, but I haven't checked to verify which side proposed and which rejected.

[roger_that]

Benjamin Grimm wrote: That notion (a ghost win) was proposed during the CBA talks earlier this year. I seem to recall that it was the players who rejected it, but someone here (Gwreck maybe?) recalls that the players suggested it and the owners rejected it. One of us is wrong, but I haven't checked to verify which side proposed and which rejected.

Well, whoever rejected it, would you trade it for a BYE?

[batmagadanleadoff]

Edgy MD wrote: There'll never be a perfect solution to this. Even if there were no playoffs and the team with the best regular season record was simply crowned the champ, people would always disagree as to whether that team is truly the best. Especially if that team has the best record by only a game or three. Well, folks can disagree all they want, but it's a tough argument to say that calling somebody the better team after achieving the most in a 162-game test is less credible than calling somebody the better team after a three-game test — the principle being that a larger sample size provides for a more compelling experiment.

I didn't say that it was "less credible". That would be an enormous understatement. I said that it wasn't credible at all. No mathematician in the world --well, no sane mathematician-- would ever conclude that a team that is one or three games better than the next over 162 games played is the better team and that luck or chance could be ruled out in explaining the one or three game advantage.* And this is so obvious given these particular numbers that I'd be willing to bet my life on this without even bothering to work out the math. This doesn't mean that the team with the better record isn't necessarily the best team, but that the numbers don't prove it out.



But people hang their hats on W-L records and are ready to dismiss the 101-win Mets as chokers because they lost to an 89 win team in the playoffs. Fans see that 12 game difference that the Mets enjoyed over the Padres and imagine an enormous advantage for the Mets, probably because a team that wins its division by 12 games likely knows, in August, that it's gonna finish in first place -- and winds up clinching first place comfortably. And if the second place team finished 12 games out, you can only imagine how far back the rest of the division finished out.



But here's the thing: the Mets didn't win 101 regular season games playing the Padres only. They also played bad teams. The dregs of baseball. They played as many bad teams as they played good teams. If they played the Padres exclusively all season long, it's virtually guaranteed that they would've won less than 101 games. So in a playoff series, the difference between the Mets and Padres --two good teams-- is much smaller than appears. And that's before accounting for luck, especially baseball luck which is more prevalent than say, basketball luck, and randomness and that they're only playing three games at most. In that setting, the Mets edge over the Padres, if there even was one, was tiny. Infinitesimal. This really is a series of coin flips. And the coin flipper can't control the outcome of a coin flip. So this is about as random as could be.



*In math terms, this means that having a one or three game lead in the standings over 162 games played is statistically insignificant to reject the null hypothesis that the one or three game lead is random or due to luck or chance. In other words, there's not enough proof to declare to a high probability that the team with the best record is in fact, the best team.

[batmagadanleadoff]

Here's some simple counting math. I counted all the head-to-head playoff series' since expanded playoffs were introduced (1994, but that was the strike year in which playoffs were canceled, so 1995) to determine how often the team with the better regular season record won its playoff series and how often the team with the lesser record won its playoff series. I ignored the one game do or die series', which were played from 2012 through 2019. Also, I ignored the entire 2020 post season as that was the Covid shortened season and regular season records consisted of only 60 games.



So how'd they do? It's a goddamn coin flip, pretty much. The team with the better record won 51% of the series'. Which means, obviously, that the team with the lesser record won its series' 49% of the time.



Teams with better record --- 97 series' won

Teams with lesser record --- 91 series' won



Maybe some other time, I'll break this down further, to see how teams with a three or four game edge, for example, did as compared to teams with, say, a five or six game edge. Of course, breaking down the series' into smaller groups will reduce the sample sizes for each group, so there's that to consider.

[Edgy MD]

All I mean to suggest is that only so much time should be indulged to a foolish idea. Graciousness toward a minority view — even a majority view that you find to be insupportable — is always important. But when there comes a point where you realize your interlocutor has exposed him- or herself as working in bad faith — clinging to an ideology that assures him or her of some shadowy worth, or is just a contrarian who finds worth in being disputed — it's time to move on. So if "people would always disagree as to whether that team is truly the best," I, in my fake role as fake king of baseball rules can only indulge that line of reasoning for so long. Let's advocate for the best, and let folks who would always disagree anyhow piss into the wind.



A short series is a far less accurate indicator of who the better team is than a season-long round-robin. As you seem to suggest, this is self evident. We agree. If I were somehow able to personally prune playoff rounds from MLB, I would, and there is only so much time I could give to anybody who argued that this crowns a less-credible champion. Eventually, the best answer is, "If hockey is so great, feel free to watch hockey."



Being jerked around by bad faith arguments is no way to go through life. Elevating playoffs over league play is a bad idea, institutionalized and backed by money though it may be. I can understand it being kept alive by greed and zealotry and power and apathy and powerlessness and culture and conservative dispositions, but not by bad faith.

[A Boy Named Seo]

except that every time a team sweeps their own series and loses the next, there's a fuck-ton of handwringing about them going cold from too many days off. it's actually among the reasons why they changed the schedule in 7 game serieses, aside from too many rest days not looking like real baseball. it was also stated as a concern going into this off season for the top seeds to be sitting around waiting for their games. you go from playing every day to sitting on your ass for a week. you lose the edge, or so the worry goes. i actually REALLY liked the old format, where the two wildcard winners would face off in a winner-take-all one game play-in. i thought it perfectly rewarded the best teams while punishing the lower seeds with the enhanced cruelties of fate. but, that still doesn't appear to sufficiently reward the top seeds, or so says the handwringing over the NL playoff results thus far. so if having too few of the top seeds make it past the first round is indeed a problem, this is one way to fix it. that i have already stated that i hate. so there. and finally, i should think that in my, what, twenty years of posting on mets boards, that any instruction on the proper spelling of a word, or correct grammatical semantical usage, is either unnecessary or completely wasted on me. i'm either irredeeemably illiterate, or just stubbornly make awful stylistic choices because i think it makes me look cool but mostly just makes me seem illiterate but honestly i don't give a shit because i'm stubborn and too heavily invested in my style to ever change and i'm going to go cry now because i'm a terrible person who thought it would be fun to write serieses instead of series because life it too painfully dull to not write deers and meese instead of deer and moose when tapping out uncapitalized musings over baseball errata and oh my god what am i even doing here when i could be curing cancer and pressing the shift key more regularly i'm sorry i'm so so sorry.

mm's last paragraph is the best closing track since "Purple Rain".

[Edgy MD]

LoL.

[roger_that]

It used to make some sense to wonder if the team that won 94 games was better or worse than the team that won 103 games because they'd played different opponents during the regular season, so who knew really which had faced stronger opposition. The World Series settled all that. Or so we pretended to think, absent further information.



Now not so much. You don't have to look very far this year to find a team that dominated all of baseball for the first 85 games of the season, and fell apart to mediocrity for the final 85 games, playoffs included. Were the Yankees a great team in the playoffs, or a mediocre team? Were the Mets strong, based on the whole regular season, or weak, based on their final month?



"That's why they play the games" but now I wonder. You could solve all the weather issues by taking the names of every team that won more than half its games, and picking one name out of a hat to settle the question of who is that year's World's Champs. Save a lot of time that way.

[MFS62]

If I had a choice, I'd rather fix an unsatisfactory (I'm not sure it's broken) playoff system than implement many of Manfred's recent "fixes" to the game itself.(e.g.- ghost runner, universal DH)

But after reading some of the solutions here, I'm not sure which, if any of them, I would pick.



Later

[Benjamin Grimm]

I think simpler is better. Expand the Wild Card Series to best of five and the Division Series to best of seven.

[metsmarathon]

it always will reward the best team at the time. there's simply no other way to think of it than that if your team has the misfortune of an ill-timed cold streak, you risk getting kicked to the curb despite the possibility that over any other 7-game stretch, that team would win every one.



such is the case of the mets, who lost but a handful of serieses (sorry, it's stuck in my head now and i couldn't stop myself even if i wanted to) throughout the year, and then lost the biggest series to a team they would have beaten at most other points in the season. ditto the dodgers.



the best way to solve that particular problem, i think, is to reward teams that can win in a longer series. every postseason series (save jeopardy-fraught play-in games, if they're your bag) should be seven games.



oh. i'll propose an alternative that i'm sure will draw ire.



four wild card teams. play-in tournament at the 1-seed's home stadium, or a nearby neutral dome. A vs B | C vs D. day-night doubleheader. winner plays the next day for the right to play the 1-seed the following day.



not too much rest for the top seeds as to ice them, and plenty of jeopardy to keep winning a division important. wild card team has a 25% chance of advancing, given coin-flip odds. if they survive that, AND knock off the 1-seed, then good on them. playoffs go only one team deeper per league. there's not really any built-in incentive to the wild card team with the best record, other than maybe being the "home" team in the day game, so they don't have as quick a turnaround for their next game. and the second game is reseeded, so the best WC team always has "home" field.



from there, seven game serieses all around.



There's a chance somebody has already proposed this or something similar upstream. dunno. give it a thought.



I'm not crazy about the neutral site idea, but i also don't want to worry about travel and three days and weather. but it could be done. maybe don't worry about the neutral site and just have the wild card teams jet all around the damned country in three days. whatever.

[kcmets]

Not cherry picking here, but I can't see a neutral-site thing ever getting

approved. A team's goal is to make the playoffs and the owners reward

(or a big one) is how much gross dough they rake in in just one home

playoff game.



I'd love to see how much the Yankees gross for a playoff game; how much

they gross from a captive rain-delay crowd that returns the following day.

[batmagadanleadoff]

it always will reward the best team at the time. there's simply no other way to think of it than that if your team has the misfortune of an ill-timed cold streak, you risk getting kicked to the curb despite the possibility that over any other 7-game stretch, that team would win every one.

This. A million times. A key feature of flipping coins to simulate events in order to run statistical experiments is that the coin behaves the same way on every single flip. The coin is "fair and balanced" and flipping it will yield one of two equally likely outcomes --- either heads or tails. And if "that fair and balanced" coin is flipped 50 times and comes up heads all 50 times, the odds of that coin coming up heads on the 51st flip would still be 50%.



Baseball doesn't work like that "fair and balanced" coin. The Mets, for example aren't the same Mets on "every single flip". One month, Max Scherzer is pitching like a Cy Young award candidate. The next month he's on the IL with an oblique issue. Then Scherzer's re-activated but perhaps, he's pitching gingerly to nurse his lingering oblique issue. Marte is an all-star for the first five months of the season and then he misses the last four weeks of the season entirely, with a fractured finger. He returns for the playoffs but who knows how compromised his skills are because of the finger fracture? I sure don't. Who can say that the playoff Mets were the same as the May and June Mets? They weren't. Which Padres team showed up for the playoffs? Certainly not the squad that had both Tatis, Jr. and Soto on the 26 man roster simultaneously. Yu Darvish pitched one of the three playoff games between the Mets and Padres. Is that representative of the Padres season? Did Darvish pitch one third of the Padres regular season games (54 starts)? If Darvish could start 54 of the Padres games without compromising his health, would the Padres still be an 89 win team? Or maybe a 109 win team? And all this is before one even begins to account for natural randomness, which would occur even if a baseball team really was as consistent as a "fair and balanced" coin.



There's no satisfactory answer and the notion of best team will almost always be an elusive one. Me, I'm confident in believing that the '86 Mets or the '76 Reds were the best baseball teams in their respective seasons. And I'd believe that even if the '86 Mets didn't mount a miraculous once in a lifetime comeback in the Bill Buckner inning and were to lose to the Red Sox in six games. Because what the hell does six games prove? But those are rare exceptions. Fans want closure. Fans can't live with ambiguous endings (See, e.g., The Sopranos series finale.) And it wouldn't be wise for the league to market its post-season as a total luck fest where you are as likely to predict the outcome in advance as you are to guess whether a flipped coin comes up heads or tails. Not only am I certain that playoff baseball is a total luck fest, but I'm certain that secretly and internally, the baseball powers damn well know this, too. Even Young Steinbrenner.

[A Boy Named Seo]

I have two more baseball fixes, both inspired by soccer because everyone loves soccer.



#1) Supporters Shield



This is the award given to the MLS team who finishes with the best record in the regular season. The USL also has the same type of award, and MLB has definitely arrived at a place where they need to reward the best teams with something before they get their asses kicked out in the playoffs. The team that finishes with the best record in the AL wins what I'll call the Larry Doby Shield and the NL is the Lizzie Arlington Shield (Lizzie, the first woman to play on a men's team in 1898, doncha know). In MLS, players split a pot of money, and in MLB, if you win the Doby or Arlington Shield, I declare that every player gets a cool $250K bonus, sponsored by Doritos or Charmin or hims, the maker of fine erectile disfunction pills. This year's winners would have been the Orioles and Braves.



[FIMG=500]https://assets.goal.com/v3/assets/bltcc7a7ffd2fbf71f5/blteccd4c5ca214b4be/633b039291f12a1148460d8a/supportersshield.jpg[/FIMG]



#2) In-Season Tournament



The NBA season has kicked off and this year features the inaugural "In Season Tournament" that borrows heavily (steals) from European football and drops a concurrent competition right in the middle of the regular season.



The tournament adds drama that is lacking in the regular season, brings new silverware for fans to clamor after, and offers cash money prizes for the players, so the Grizzlies now have plenty of motivation to beat the Jazz on a cold Tuesday night in Salt Lake in November. And the wins and losses in the tournament all count towards regular season records, so if the tourney idea doesn't move your needle, it's still a game on the way to the playoffs.



With double the regular season games of the NBA season, MLB needs to do the same. I'm going to call ours the Castro Cup after Colombian Lou Castro, who signed for Connie Mack's Philadelphia A's in 1902 and became the first Latino player in MLB. Our tournament now has a name so it's already better than the NBA's.



MLB could hype it up by having a televised draw, complete with ping pong balls and corresponding numbered envelopes revealed by team legends. And City Connect jerseys would only be worn during the Castro Cup games, giving it a different feel aesthetically. And the Cup Final would be held at Field of Dreams or wherever that game is being held. One game in the cornfield for the cup and the cash. And like the NBA, players on the winning team get $500K each, losing team $250K, semifinal teams $100K and quarterfinals $50K.



In conclusion, this does not fix the playoffs in any way, but it makes the regular infinitely more interesting and meaningful, and gives new motivations to players, teams and fans.



THE END

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

sign me up for the supportrs shield.



an IST in baseball might be fun. You'd have to craft the entire season schedule around it, and rainouts would be a problem. But let's see how the NBA does with theirs. The risk is it devalues non-IST games

Edited October 27, 2023 by Guest