No, today's topic is expanded playoffs and how stupid of an idea it is. Not Major League 3 Back to the Minors-stupid, just Teen Wolf Too-stupid.
It looks like there's a good chance a 10-team playoff field, with an extra wild card entry and an added best-of-3 series, will be recommended during this month's winter meetings, as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Rick Hummel reported today. Let me be the 7,000th to say this idea smells like Steve Balboni's tube socks after a doubleheader. Here's what MLB is proposing:
1. Let's make a really long post-season even longer, with even more off days!
2. You know how a five-game Division Series is too short because it has the potential to just reward a team playing pretty well in October, rather than a really good team that played well for six months? Well, we're going to add an extra round of playoffs, and make it a best-of-3! Are you ready for Tigers-Bluejays and Astros-Padres?!
(Sea Captain's voice) I...don't know what I'm doing
I understand baseball is a business and this extra round of playoffs is about money-TV, advertising, concessions/ticket sales-and that a general manager can maybe hang on to his job another year if he can go to the owner and say "we made the playoffs." Sure, he made the playoffs with 76 wins and got swept in two (!) games in a wild card elimination series, but did you see that SECOND WILD CARD TEAM - 2012 banner out behind the left field wall?! It's blue for 'second wild card team'!
Hummel also argues that even with a 10-team field, MLB would still have the lowest number of any of the four professional sports. Twelve teams qualify in the NFL, while an absurd 16 teams qualify for the post-season in both the NBA and NHL. While the NFL model seems to be working just fine, basketball and hockey allowing more than half of the teams into the playoffs is ridiculous. Raptors-Bucks? That's what we're headed towards in baseball.
Either way, the Mets are already mathematically eliminated.
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