ESPN: MLB weighing major changes to postseason, including growing number of teams to 14

BleedGopher

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per ESPN:

Major League Baseball is mulling significant changes to its postseason, including increasing the number of teams from 10 to 14 and adding a reality-TV-type format to determine which teams play each other in an expanded wild-card round, sources told ESPN.

MLB is considering a move in which each league would have three division winners and four wild-card teams make the postseason, sources said. The best team in the league would receive a bye into the division series, while the two remaining division winners and the wild-card team with the best record of the four would each host all games of a best-of-three series of the opening round.

The potential changes were first reported by the New York Post.

Once the teams clinch, and the regular season ends, the plan gets congested:

  • The division winner with the second-best record would select its wild-card opponent from the three wild-card winners with the worst records of the four.
  • The team with the worst record of the three division winners would pick its opponent from the remaining two wild-card teams.
  • The final matchup would pit the wild-card winner with the best record against the wild-card team not chosen.

Win Twins!!
 


Really dumb. They should go back down to 8. Why play 162 games if half the teams make the playoffs? Should we know who the best handful of teams are after that many games? Do they really need to reward more mediocre teams?
 

When is the World Series? December?
 

We can watch Game 7 after Thanksgiving dinner!
 



They do need radical change to their playoff format, but this sure ain't it. NBA and NHL have interminably long playoff seasons, making them all but unwatchable to non-fans of the teams involved. Baseball has already gone too far in that direction and is now digging deeper in that hole.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again: MY radical plan involves league championship series that are structured like the college world series in NCAA baseball and softball. Triple- or quadruple-elimination structure, all conducted at a relatively warm-weather neutral site. This might just be me, but the double-elimination softball tournaments my daughter played in were some of the most exciting and fun days, and doing something similar over multiple days with multiple games in a day would rival the NCAA basketball tournament for fun, excitement and fan interest. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Oh, by the way, in my proposal, the World Series would still be the same as ever.
 

God, "reality type TV". Have we come to that? MLB is reality. Lets not despoil it anymore.
 

The reason the NBA and NHL regular season suck is that it's too easy to make the play-offs. The top 3-4 teams know they can coast in and the bottom 3-4 teams generally only have to finish .500 to make it. MLB should not replicate that.
 



Bad idea. Should drop wild cards completely. Instead, have two seasons with the All Star break being the end of the first and start of the second. The winner of the second half season is the "home team" for a 5 game series against the winner of the first half of the season. If the same team wins both "seasons", they get a bye into the second round.
 

No. Just no. I don't like the current format of 5 teams with the one-game wildcard "play-in" game. But adding teams isn't the way to fix it.
 

This is misdirection, pure and simple.

MLB got a huge black eye from the Astros' sign-stealing fiasco, and a lot of people think the punishment was too lenient.

so, MLB throws out this ridiculous idea to try and change the story. Unfortunately, the idea is so ridiculous that it just makes MLB and the current Commissioner look even more out-of-touch and idiotic.

I remember when the AL Champ and the NL Champ met in the World Series. then, they went to divisions and added the AL and NL championship series. That is where it should have ended. Let the other sports have wild cards and all that. Let baseball be the sport that still honors tradition.
 




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