That the Los Angeles Dodgers, Atlanta, and New York Mets and their fans are feeling hard done by is understandable. Each was a legitimate contender to win it all. Each didn’t survive a round, meaning that of the four 100-win teams in the majors, only one made it to the championship series. Crazier still is that the 99-win New York Yankees must win a Game 5 Monday night against the 92-win Cleveland Guardians to avoid the same one-and-out fate.
Factor in three of the four road teams winning their wild-card series in the opening round and chaos very clearly reigns in baseball’s first post-season under the new six-teams-per-league format. Only the 106-win Houston Astros came out of the bye granted to the top two division winners in each league looking like the juggernaut they had been all year, sweeping the 90-win Seattle Mariners, one of the wild-card road warriors who swept the 92-win Toronto Blue Jays.
Small sample sizes are, of course, prone to be random, as this October is demonstrating.
“The great thing about baseball is the unpredictability,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts told reporters Saturday after his team gave up a five-spot in the seventh inning of a 5-3 loss that gave the San Diego Padres a 3-1 division series victory. “And the tough thing about it is the same thing.”
As bang on as his words are — similar to those spoken by Blue Jays interim manager John Schneider, who after his team blew a seven-run lead in a season-ending 10-9 loss, said, “post-season is great and post-season sucks, because at some point if you’re not the last team standing, you have to rip a Band-Aid off and your season is over” — that’s cold comfort for teams and fan-bases that expected more.
Hence, the customary navel-gazing and obligatory discourse questioning everything from whether the new playoff format has diluted the post-season too much, to how the six-day break between the wild-card and division-series rounds disadvantaged the four bye winners.
It makes for great fodder, but is meaningless for trying to draw conclusions, as Blue Jays GM Ross Atkins pointed out when asked what three of the four wild-card series being won by the road team said about the new post-season.
“I wouldn’t call that a study, myself,” Atkins replied. “Doing it over, we would definitely be playing for home-field if we were in the same position. I would want more information to really comment on it in an educated way.”
Such a measured reply doesn’t always play well in these instant-analysis times, even if it’s absolutely the right approach.
After all, so much of the discourse begins with the chaos being bad, but, biases aside … is it?
Objectively, the goal of every sport is to crown a just champion, but when a short tournament prone to randomness is used to decide the outcome, that’s not particularly realistic. What that tournament does, though, is keep more markets engaged longer and maintain interest through the unpredictability — Team X should win it all, but will it?
In trying to decide which team is really the best, there’s no better benchmark than the grind of the 162-game schedule, and in 2022, the Dodgers were without doubt the standard, no matter what happened in the playoffs. The possibility of a second chance in the post-season for the other clubs is good business though, not to mention good fun.
“The more teams you have in, the more interest you have around the country and around the cities that are in MLB,” said Phillies manager Rob Thomson. “So I think the more the better.”
Whether the Dodgers needed a World Series title to validate their season is another discussion and ultimately comes down to what is emphasized and valued.
Every team, understandably, wants to be the last club standing and to win the season’s final game, but as the barrier-to-entry for the playoffs decreases, perhaps regular-season success isn’t being weighed properly.
“There are certainly fans that are going to think it was a wasted season. I don’t think there’s anybody in our clubhouse, in uniform or with the Dodgers, that feels that way. But every person has their opinions, which they’re entitled,” said Roberts. “Again, this hurts everyone because we didn’t accomplish our goal and that’s the bottom line. This one hurts.”
Atlanta, the defending World Series champions, make for an intriguing case study.
Last year, Atlanta won the National League East with an 88-73 record, entered the post-season with the fewest wins of any of the 10 playoff qualifiers, and proceeded to knock off Milwaukee, the Dodgers and Houston. In every objective way imaginable, the team was better in 2022, yet it got bounced in four games by a Philadelphia Phillies squad that won only 87 games, switched managers 51 games in and wouldn’t have qualified for October if not for the format change.
Given all that, allowing one series to overshadow all the good accomplished in the regular season doesn’t seem to make much sense.
“They should be very proud of what they did this year,” Atlanta manager Brian Snitker said of how he’d want his players to process what happened. “You just never know where the post-season is going to take you and what’s going to happen. But we had a really strong year. The goal was to get into the post-season. We did and it didn’t happen.”
The inevitable results are deep dives and the shaping of narratives to fit events — the Padres, Phillies and, if they advance, the Guardians rising to meet the moment and, inversely, the Dodgers, Atlanta and, if they lose, the Yankees, collapsing under expectations; the time off for the bye teams leaving them rusty; winning wild-card series giving those teams momentum.
Too often, it’s about what story you want to tell yourself.
The Blue Jays lived that in the wake of their devastating loss to the Mariners and their challenge is how to reasonably judge those two games against the 162 before them and not overreact to a sample that, if not for the implications, would be meaningless to assess.
As Yankees manager Aaron Boone put it, “because this is a new format, at the end of all this, everyone is going to analyze it and probably frankly overanalyze it some. You have to do it for years to really get a real firm grasp on it.”
To accumulate a meaningful data set, he’s right. But the principle has long been clear. The best team in the regular season doesn’t always win the World Series — remember the 116-win Mariners of 2001, anyone? — and with more clubs now in the playoffs, there’s more opportunity for randomness and off-the board outcomes.
