Opinion: MLB needs to shorten its regular season, expand playoffs. Here's why.
There was no doubting who had the better team last October, when the Reds got swept in Atlanta in a best-of-three wild-card series. Cincinnati didn’t score in either game. It deserved to be bounced in its first postseason appearance in seven years.
But it took two games to make that plain. No one would suggest that losing 1-0 in 13 innings in Game 1 proved much of anything, except the Reds left their lumber in Cincinnati.
Two games left little doubt. One shutout is a coincidence. Two is a trend. The Braves got what they deserved. So did the Reds. This year, Major League Baseball is back to its single-game elimination, lightning-round way of deciding the wild card winner. It’s a bad idea that gets worse every year.
This is no small matter around here. If current standings hold between now and the end of the regular season – and there is little reason to think they won’t – the Reds reward for grinding through six months, 162 games, one bad bullpen and one great Joey Votto for President summer will be a one-game puncher’s chance against Los Angeles at Dodger Stadium.
Whoopee.
We’ll get into the particulars of that matchup momentarily. First, the larger points:
A one-game decider disrespects the pastime’s best attribute and makes even more plain the huge advantage owned by big-money clubs. Baseball’s strength is its numbers. Its best number is 162. One-six-two is the great equalizer. It eliminates coincidence and rewards persistence.
You have to be lucky to make baseball’s postseason, yes, but that luck is mostly defined by your team’s ability to stay relatively healthy. The long season flattens all notes, high and low. It smooths the bad bounces. In baseball, you get what you deserve.
Marathons aren’t decided by sprints. Skyscrapers don’t appear overnight. Great literature doesn’t start with "It was a dark and stormy night" and end a sentence later with, "It really was."
Seasons build, seasons evolve. What you see in the spring isn’t always what you get in the dog days. What if the ’21 Reds had been defined by April and May? This isn’t football, where if you’re 0-4 in September, forget about October. It’s not Ohio State football, where if you finish 10-2, have fun at the Peach Bowl. Here’s a copy of the home game.
It’s baseball, where the march of 162 games shouldn’t end at the gates of a single-game playoff. A regular season that’s abundantly fair shouldn’t be replaced by a football postseason. Let Zac Taylor deal with the Any Given Sundays.
There’s also this:
After the Reds briefly celebrate their postseason berth, they’ll ponder their reward: Walker Buehler. If not Buehler, Max Scherzer. If not Scherzer, Clayton Kershaw. The latter two pitchers each has three Cy Young Awards; Buehler is the NL favorite this year.
That sort of starting pitching excellence costs money. The Dodgers are OK with that, given their payroll is roughly $280 million, tops by far in the game. The Reds check in at $130 million. Imagine the Bengals not being able to afford Joe Burrow. Baseball doesn’t need more reasons to bring attention to its woeful economics.
Here’s what they should do, and they should do it ASAP, preferably in their next Basic Agreement: Reduce the 162-game season to 154 games. It’d still be a testament to the grind. Expand the playoffs to 16 teams. Make the wild-card round best-of-three.
No pro league that has expanded its playoffs has ever regretted it or gone back to a previous format. The college football playoff will expand soon. More interest, more TV eyeballs, more money. Also, more equitable and more credible. More of a fighting chance for teams such as the Reds.
When I was still a fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates, they put two very good seasons back to back and had zero to show for either. In 2014, they won 88 games, then lost the wild card game to Madison Bumgarner and the Giants. Mad Bum was unhittable that October.
It was worse for the Bucs in ’15. They won 98 times, for which they earned a one-game shot at Jake Arrieta, 22-6 with the Cubs, with a 1.77 ERA and a Cy Young Award. Yo-ho-ho, mateys.
Baseball is too good a sport to begin its postseason with a stopwatch. Fix the wild card round. Be quick about it.