Compared with other major North American sports leagues, Major League Baseball’s playoff format is rather elitist.
In both the NHL and NBA, 16 of the 30 teams in the league make the playoffs each year. In the NFL, 12 of the 32 teams make it. The CFL is so wide open that six of eight teams make it to the post-season.
In baseball’s 30-team league, only eight teams make it to the post-season. Only one non-division winner from each conference has the chance to play in October.
This does not bode well for a team like the Toronto Blue Jays, which finished with a respectable 85-77 record this season, but was seventh in the American League and fourth out of the five teams in the American League East division.
The limited playoff format employed by MLB has many implications. For a general manager who knows his team has no chance of making the playoffs, there is little incentive to take risks to improve the team immediately.
With a limited playoff format, more teams are content to let the season play out. In addition, some teams on the fringe decide to trade away their top players with expiring contracts to get some value in return.
Another issue is fan interest. When fans realize that their team is out of the playoff race in June, it takes away a lot of motivation to go to games, or even follow the team at all.
Look at the Blue Jays, who have not made the post-season since their second consecutive championship in 1993. They have not had attendance totals above the league average since Roger Clemens and Jose Canseco played on the team back in 1998.
Despite having a relatively successful season that included Jose Bautista’s 54 home runs, the emergence of a promising young pitching staff, and a winning record, their attendance was still lower than it has been in years.
Since the end of the World Series, there have been serious talks about expanding the playoff format.
Fans of teams like the Blue Jays would welcome a 16-team system similar to hockey and basketball. It would give a whole new life to fans during the middle of the season, who would actually believe their team has a chance. League attendance and television ratings would surely skyrocket.
However, baseball is primarily an outdoor game, making this format unrealistic. In hockey and basketball, the four rounds of best-of-seven series add an additional two months to the schedule.
This would mean that with the current 162-game season, the playoffs could potentially still be going on in December, and Commissioner Bud Selig has already spoken against reducing the regular season because of the loss in ticket and television revenue.
While some games are already played in cold and windy temperatures in October and November, I can’t imagine the Players’ Association would approve letting players risk playing in snow.
One solution to this problem would be to take football’s format of holding the championship in a pre-determined location. This would mean that the only eligible cities would either be in the south, or have an indoor stadium.
However, this would mean that fans who stuck it out for a long season would not have the chance to see their team play the most important games of the year at home.
A more realistic option that has been discussed by both Selig and Blue Jays President Paul Beeston is for each league to have one additional wildcard team. The two wildcard teams in each conference would play a mini-series to determine who makes the divisional playoffs.
This would give the division champions a bye from the first round, which would properly distinguish a division title as more of a feat than sneaking into the playoffs as a wildcard team.
Expanding the format from eight to ten teams is nothing ground-breaking, but it’s a start. Discussions are still underway and any changes that occur will not come into effect until 2012, at the earliest.
Unfortunately, for Blue Jays fans, this does not change the fact that the team is still forced to directly compete with two teams with high payrolls, who have the luxury of buying themselves into the playoffs virtually every year.
But that’s another problem altogether.