MLB 2022: The Long and Winding Thread

I don't think the playoff system has been around long enough to be part of the problem. Also, it has been constantly evolving the last few years due to COVID. It is way too early to make that judgement.

I'm not sure I buy your premise regarding the need for 162 games. If anything, getting rid of the one-game Wild Card made the regular season more important, not less. It made the playoff results a little less random.

The expanded playoffs keep more teams in contention. This is particularly important for a sport with such an imbalanced financial system. The real and perceived inequity leaves enough fans feeling left out as it is. Reducing the number of playoff teams will add to that issue.

Some of the changes aren't great, but going backward isn't going to help baseball. It most likely won't ever be the national pastime again. That isn't about the rules. It is about the game being regional and other games being a more natural fit for a modern audience that is attached to its devices and has no attention span.

 

Because it doesn’t follow chalk, it’s automatically bad? Tell that to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.

And if we go back to the 50s, where two teams go to the World Series, is going to help? This year, September would have been irrelevant. Dodgers won going away. Astros had a big enough lead that everyone except the Yankees would have packed it in.

And, oh yeah, the team with the second best record still won. The playoffs are fine. They shouldn’t grow more but making September relevant for more teams isn’t horrible.

 

How many games does a D1 basketball program play in a season?

Or an EPL team?

Or an NFL team?

If you want to keep the MLB playoffs, great!

Shorten the regular season.

 

Comparing games played is a red herring.

I said the tournament because you said teams teams with the best record losing is bad. It’s great in college hoops and eventually the most complete teams win.

EPL doesn’t have playoffs and plays longer on the calendar.

NFL expanded its regular season. Oh and they physically can’t play more than 30.

So now it isn’t the playoffs it’s how long the season is. I love ya bro, but you’re just wrong here.

 

I don't think I said this

I just think the playoffs undo the need for a long long season.

A long season playing lots of games is meant to flatten out randomness, streaks, injuries and other variables. OK, if baseball wants its long season, it should reward those teams that did best over the long haul.

If though baseball wants an explosive, unpredictable tournament-style postseason, it should shorten the regular season substantially.

Say 80 games.

 

That'd screw with what is both baseball's financial strength and financial vulnerability -- the huge live gate inventory. Some insightful woman long ago said "sports is soap opera for guys." Baseball's the only sport to run on a true soap opera schedule. Fans would react with horror to a half-season schedule. They just bitch about the playoffs.

 

So the best teams losing is bad. That’s what that all means. Dodgers, Braves, Mets, Astros and Yankees all the best over 162 but only one made it to the series. Didn’t make the playoffs awful.

And 80 games? You want to save baseball by cutting the season in half so the playoffs can be more to your liking? Yeah, let’s make a game that fewer people are into even more expensive and harder to go to. C’mon man.

 

True as that is, they were running for the exits this year before the season-ending climax.

And those WS television numbers have been in decline for decades.

It's hard to separate the noise from the signal when we talk about baseball.

 

World Series games have the same problem on TV that night college football does. Potential viewers know it's gonna be probably a four hour commitment from start to finish and maybe more (Game one ended at like 12:40 a.m. EDT). Given the stakes, it's only human nature that the game slows down from its not exactly breakneck pace in regular season games. I watched it, but my team was in it. If it'd been the Astros and the Dodgers or Padres, no way I watch past the fourth. That's East Coast bias, I know, but on Pacific time, you're cutting into people's dinner hours and worse, having the start be in commuting time. That has to make a lot of people less likely to then tune in.

 

I'm saying you can't have it both ways. The TV numbers over the years demonstrate that.

An overexposed watered-down marathon ending in a series of short, sharp playoffs makes no sense.

It's an either / or proposition.

Long season? Great. Reward excellence across its entirety.

Explosive one-and-done playoffs, like March Madness?

Also great. But shorten the regular season to avoid fan exhaustion.

 

The World Series has always had those problems. (One of the reasons I suggested more WS day games)

The numbers continue to plummet.

 

Not that I'm old or anything, but I was in college the first night Series game, which wasn't until 1971 IIRC.