As our attention turns towards the stretch run, it’s a good time to remember that MLB’s current postseason format is a fiasco.
Quick rule: Under no circumstance should there be any best-of-three or best-of-five series anywhere in MLB’s postseason format. They both stink to the high heavens!
The best-of-five series is a skimpier version of the more classical and beautifully layered best-of-seven, and the best-of-three is an awkward, unnecessary, scheduling nightmare that gives you the same result as the best-of-one in much lamer fashion. I never liked the idea of a best-of-three postseason series on paper and, so far, it’s somehow proven even worse in reality. You get all of the unpredictability that comes with a short series in terms of results, and have to build that uncertainty into the schedule which holds up everything else, but you get none of the guaranteed, pure, instant, high-end drama that comes attached with the instant elimination of the best-of-one.
In the three years the current best-of-three Wild Card format has been in place, there’s been twelve of these shoddy series, and so far, the winner of Game 1 has gone on to win every single one of them. In fact, the early tide in these things has been so strong that ten of them have been 2-0 sweeps. What a massively underwhelming way to kick off October!
So if you’re extremely likely to get the same result and the same team advancing as we did in the gloriously dramatic one game elimination format, what are we doing playing a best-of-three? Not only does it not solve the randomness of a team’s season coming down to such a small sample size, but it holds up all the top seeds who have to wait around for five days and stalls the momentum of the entire sport.
This is the unpleasant and painfully drawn out setup we currently have leading up to the start of the LDS round day by day:
Sunday: Game 162 for everybody as the season ends.
Monday: Off Day buffer to start the postseason. (This one is fine.)
Tuesday: Four Game 1s guaranteed (many stacked on top of each other during a workday afternoon).
Wednesday: Four Game 2s guaranteed (many stacked on top of each other during a workday afternoon).
Thursday: Somewhere between zero and four games, and you won’t know what this number looks like to plan your schedule until less than 24 hours before they start.
Friday: Zero games! (It’s because of an off Day buffer needed for teams who may have played a Game 3, even though they just had one on Monday.)
Saturday: We finally start the LDS round.
Sunday: Only two of the four LDS series are active because MLB needs to get them off sequence for TV purposes. So there’s yet another off day for half the remaining teams.
This is ridiculous! In 2023, we were waiting around for two days with no baseball on Thursday and Friday thanks to this ludicrous format. This isn’t good for fans, it’s not good for the top seeded teams, it’s not good for the TV partners who can’t market the unpredictability in the schedule, and it’s not good for the momentum of the sport, which badly needs to be producing excitement and hooking people in during this critical week.
Furthermore, this bloated, expanded postseason format treats each of the bottom eight teams the same by throwing all of them in the same bucket, which is both unfair and problematic. Why should a division winner be exposed to the same randomness of the best-of-three series as a third Wild Card team?
Ideally, there would just be fewer postseason teams. We’d have more urgency in the 162 game regular season, and the big dogs wouldn’t have to wait around. But if we’re going to have this enormous playoff field, it really needs to be broken into three tiers (instead of the two we currently have, which worked much better when the split was six teams and four teams in the old ten team format with the two Wild Card play in games).
Fortunately, there’s a small tweak that would allow MLB to do this and help the sport on all fronts. Instead of treating the 3, 4, 5 and 6 seeds all the same and throwing them into a chaotic best-of-three series, have the 3 and 4 seeds face off on Tuesday in a single game match up that will decide who advances to the LDS. The loser will then fall into a single game elimination matchup on Thursday.
Who will they play? The winner of a one-game, Wild Card playoff on Wednesday between the 5 and 6 seeds. (And quite frankly, I still think this is rather generous to the 5 and 6 seeds since for most of baseball history they got to play zero post season games.)
Repeating the opening week of the postseason schedule from above, here’s what it would look like under this tweaked format starting on Tuesday:
Tuesday: Two games guaranteed, both one game series between the 3 and 4 seeds to determine who advances to the LDS and who loses and gets pushed to the cliff’s edge. It’s not quite an elimination game, but something big is instantly being decided between strong, middle tiered teams.
Wednesday: Two elimination games guaranteed, both between the 5 and 6 seeds with the loser going home. (The winners immediately get on a plane to whatever city lost their game on Tuesday. Tremendous drama, and the stuff legacies are made of if you manage to win both!)
Thursday: Two elimination games guaranteed with the winners advancing to the LDS and getting an off day on Friday.
Friday: Two guaranteed LDS games since the two series matchups decided on Tuesday night will be ready to start.
Saturday: Four games guaranteed, and in beautiful fashion, this first happens on a weekend, which is a day you can freely stack games in the afternoon without most people having to work.
Sunday: Four games guaranteed because unlike the current system, the LDS series are already naturally off sequence and you don’t need another aggravating off day built in.
Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
This proposed format is:
- Far more dramatic
- Orders of magnitude more digestible for the average fan
- Easier to market for the networks
- Fairer for the participants as it preprograms an advantage for the 3 and 4 seeds over the 5 and 6 seeds.
Instead of subjecting eight different teams to the same level of chaos with no distinction, you’ve now tiered the twelve playoff teams into three clean groups of four. You have the 1 and 2 seeds who will all automatically advance to the LDS with a 100% chance of being there, you have the 3 and 4 seeds with a 75% chance of making the LDS (the two guaranteed from the Tuesday games and then assume they win the Thursday game half the time), and then you have the 5 and 6 seeds with a 25% chance of making the LDS (two of the four will be eliminated on Wednesday and then assume those winners will win the Thursday game half the time).
This then leaves you with an LDS that will, over the long-haul and on average, consist of the four best teams, three of the next four best teams, and then one true Cinderella that will have just cheated death not once, but twice in what was probably bonkers fashion.
At this point, it probably goes without saying that the LDS gets expanded from a best-of-five to a best-of-seven. Not just because of the opening statement from their piece and the best teams in the sport deserving a fully fleshed out series (didn’t you want more Dodgers vs. Padres when that series ended last year?), but also because the owners need to make their money back from the lost postseason inventory from earlier in the week. This not only does that, but will probably add a couple of games in the trade-off.
Photo by Daniel Shirey/MLB Photos via Getty Images
Now with the bulk of the work done, I think it would also help the sport if they made one more tweak: Make the seven game LDS format 3-2-2 in terms of home vs. road. This will again make the schedule so much better for both the viewer and the networks because it aligns three of the four days where the sport could have four postseason games stacked on top of each other with the weekend. Those dates in this format would be the first Saturday of the postseason, the first Sunday, a Wednesday (can’t avoid it), and then if all the series went long, again on the following Saturday. I think this is so important to make the postseason work on a macro level and hook people in.
Two games per day is perfect during the work week Monday through Friday. Any more than that and they start stepping all over each other, forcing fans to fragment into their favorite series, which ultimately makes it so difficult to generate national buzz for the rest of October. On the contrary, the weekend is exactly where you want the games stacked because you can spread them out all day with less of a ratings consequence. You could even start the Sunday slate at noon before the NFL begins.
Lastly, while the extra home games may look like a huge advantage for the higher seeds, it’s actually not. There’s no sport where home field matters less than MLB, and honestly, fans of the teams that have been the best over 162 games deserve a weekend where they get three home games to kick off the festivities. Since even a seven game series will bring random results where the lower seeds advance with surprising regularity (because the MLB postseason is crazy) that’s a great reward!
It also forces teams to use their bullpen more right off the bat, which makes for a much, much better baseball series than the disappointing and disorderly off-day filled mess we have now. In this current format, two of the top four teams in the sport play just two games in the first nine days of the playoffs. (They start with five days off, get another off day between Games 1 and 2 to get the series off sequence for TV, and then there’s a travel day between Game 2 and Game 3.) I’m sorry, but that’s just not baseball. It needs to change!
For the overall comparison, here’s the current system vs. the proposed system in terms of how many games would be on the docket each day. Draw your own conclusions as to which is better.
The MLB postseason should be the crown jewel of the sport, and if it’s handed correctly, it will become that in just a few short years. There’s so much chaos naturally baked into this DNA of this organism, you don’t need to throw chaos on top chaos with such a broad brush. Instead, you need a tiered, structured system where you organize the mayhem.
But most of all, there should be no best-of-three and no best-of-five series anywhere in the MLB postseason format. Either a series is worth letting play out for a full seven games, or it demands both teams immediately be thrown into the fryer. Bring the drama, and get this right in the future!