Do you accept the results of the 2022 playoffs? This isn’t some obtuse political metaphor, it’s conversation in some circles after three teams that won more than 100 games in the regular season fell to theoretically inferior teams in the first two rounds of the playoffs. It’s a hell of a start for baseball’s newest postseason format that strikes many fans, especially of those eliminated teams, as essentially unfair.
It started with the 101 wins for the New York Mets, who didn’t even make the National League Divisional Series. Forced to face the San Diego Padres in a new three-game Wild Card series, the Mets only managed to win one playoff game. The Atlanta Braves, although they got a bye after just beating the Mets for the NL East title, didn’t do much better. They managed to earn the same number of playoff wins as the Mets, losing 3-1 in the NLDS to the Philadelphia Phillies, who finished 14 games below both teams in the NL East standings.
Yet even those extinctions don’t compare to the fate of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who wrapped up a 111-51 regular season (the fourth-highest total in MLB history) that put them in the top seed. of the National League. On a rare rainy Saturday night in San Diego, the Padres pulled off a stunning win from behind over their heavily favored foes to claim a 3-1 victory in the NLDS. It’s the same Padres who finished 22 games behind the Dodgers in the NL West. In just four playoff games, the Padres have made a huge, meaningless regular-season gap.
Given these results, what exactly is the regular season good for if three of its top four teams (on paper) haven’t even come close to the World Series? (The Houston Astros, for the record, easily handled the Seattle Mariners just happy to be there.) The first complaints were aimed directly at MLB’s expanded playoff format, which now includes three Wild Card teams in each league, two of which – the Phillies and the Padres – will now play for a spot in the World Series.
Of course, those who remember the fate of the Seattle Mariners in 2001 know that such unfair results also happened in the “three division winners and one team Wild Card” format of the recent past. These Mariners, led by Ichiro Suzuki, tied MLB’s single-season winning record after going 116-46. By losing to the New York Yankees in the ALCS, they became the only MLB team to win more than 110 games and not play in a World Series until, of course, the Dodgers did. even failed to qualify for the Championship Series this year.
So there is a precedent here. Not counting the Covid-shortened 2020, the last MLB team with the best regular season record to win the World Series was the 2018 Boston Red Sox. Prior to that, that had only happened 12 times since 1969, the beginning of the divisional era.
Compare that to the NFL and the NBA, leagues where a single player – whether it’s an elite quarterback in football or a Michael Jordan/LeBron James type in basketball – can be a deciding factor in how a dominant starting pitcher (who typically only plays every five plays) or a Barry Bonds (who has never won a ring) will ever be able to. Since 1975, the top seed in the NFC or AFC has won 25 of 46 Super Bowls, though it’s hard to compare the knockout NFL playoffs with the MLB playoffs. In the NBA, which is a closer comparison, the results are less decisive: since the 1999-00 season, only seven No. 1 seeds overall have won championships.
Perhaps the biggest controversy shouldn’t be about who got eliminated, but who moved on. Before Saturday, two teams that had won less than 90 games in an uncut regular season never continued face each other in an LCS. Seeming to happen immediately after MLB extended the playoffs isn’t a complete coincidence.
That may explain the criticism: the Padres and Phillies, seen from a certain angle, look unworthy of advancing. These are, on paper, teams beating more qualified candidates, but only in the context of a relatively tiny five-game sample. To quote the defector’s David J Roth, it doesn’t make sense, “in a way that would likely satisfy someone who wanted to see the most deserving teams through the playoffs in an orderly fashion.”
The playoffs, he notes, don’t work that way. They haven’t since the World Series was decided between the team with the best record in the American League and its National League counterpart. MLB will never return to this format: It would mean too many fanbases with nothing to root for by mid-summer and – more importantly as far as owners are concerned – too much money left on the table thanks to all those unplayed postseason games.
So the MLB playoffs, however constructed, will be like life: messy, chaotic, and deeply unfair to most of us. If there is a solution, the answer could be for us to rethink the winner mentality that has sucked much of the fun out of sport. It is we, ultimately, who have devalued the regular season by favoring the championships above all. Those 111 Dodgers wins don’t go away just because they didn’t win the World Series, even if their fans feel it immediately after the NLDS.
Playoff success perhaps shouldn’t be considered the only way to measure a team’s year worth. There’s no objective reason to treat the Mariners’ 2001 season as anything less than the 2006 St Louis Cardinals who went 83-78 in the regular season before stumbling to an inexplicable World Series victory. To think that only the rings matter is to say that 29 out of 30 MLB teams fail every year is a depressing perspective to have on anything, let alone the games people play.
It’s time to get out of this pattern. Unless, of course, the team you’re supporting wins a title. So obviously it’s the biggest team ever assembled and no one has the right to tell you otherwise.
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