Five?!?

Apparently Major League Baseball is strongly considering changing the structure of the baseball season such that five teams would make the playoffs. This would be accomplished either by adding a second wild card or by, more radically, eliminating divisions and just letting the five teams with the best records in each league make the playoffs. I am strongly, strongly opposed. You just can't do this, it seems to me. Through history, the major league playoffs have featured two, four, and currently eight teams. There's a pattern here: these are all powers of two. This is very logical, because it is actually impossible to do a bracketed tournament with any number of competitors except a power of two without doing something Weird. I assume that in this case the particular Weirdness that they would invoke would be making the two "worst" teams in each league, either the two wild-cards or the two teams with the worst records among the five, play a head-to-head elimination match before the bracketed tournament begins. That's just awful, it strikes me. It's contrived and it's silly. It creates a whole new section of the baseball season: you'd have the regular season for about 180 days, then this new middle round for four-ish days, and then the real playoffs for a few weeks. Never mind the fact that this would push the end of the season all the way into mid-November, and it's been getting pretty silly already. It would just be inelegant.

If you're looking to change things up, if you find the current structure of the MLB unsatisfying, then there a couple of things you could do. One would be to go back to two divisions per league, let each division winner get in, and have two wild cards. You'd probably want to make the division winners have some slight advantage in the post-season, like home-field advantage in the division series, so as to give the team in second place in a given division an incentive to try and win its division outright. The other approach, I think, would be to try and get rid of the wild cards. If we assume that axing the division series and going back to the LCS-World Series format is not in the cards, this means having four divisions.

The way I picture this is to wait until the economy really gets going again (but probably getting started now-ish, since construction is so effing cheap right now) and build two more teams. As a net matter these teams would end up in the American League, and both leagues would then have 16 teams for a total of 32, but you could put one or both of the new teams in the NL and move an existing team or two to the AL if you really wanted to. My candidates for locations for these new teams are New Orleans and Puerto Rico, but there might be other possibilities as well. Anyway, then you would make four divisions with four teams each in each league, call them Eastern, Southern, Central, and Western. You'd divide the schedule up as follows: twenty-four games of interleague play, one three-game series against each team in the other league's parallel division (west plays west, east plays east, etc.) every year and one three-game series against each team in one of the other three opposite-league divisions on a rotating basis; eighty-four games of interdivisional play, with seven total games against each of the twelve teams not in your division; and fifty-four games of intradivision play, eighteen games against each of the three other teams in your division. This way everyone in the same division would play the exact same schedule each year. At least, that's how I'd do the scheduling, but perhaps that's just me. The point is, you'd have four spots in the post-season, each of which would be a simple competition with four contenders for one spot, each playing the same schedule. Simple, elegant. The structure of interleague play is designed to maintain rivalry matches (Mets vs. Yankees, Cubs vs. White Sox) while maintaining balance (so the Mets don't play the Yankees six times each year and no one else in our division plays them at all!) and allowing every team to see every other team at least every third year.

The fundamental point here is that getting things untracked from powers of two is a very, very bad idea. Before expansion began there had been sixteen MLB teams for a long, long time. It's always felt to me like the natural destination of expansion is 32 teams, the next power of two up. It doesn't matter too terribly much if they don't end up getting there, but any proposal to change the playoffs so that something other than a simple single-elimination tournament is taking place just seem wrong-headed to me.