Quote:
Originally Posted by sabometrics
I hate the NBA format. What baseball has right now is great. As much as it sucks that some organizations go decades without a playoff berth, I wouldn't have it any other way.
Call me a "purist," but I don't want a system that gives more teams this false hope late in the season only to cheapen the playoffs.
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I agree. And the move one team over thing doesn't make sense, since there needs to be an even number on both sides otherwise a team is left out in a series, unless you have interleague play year round with two teams.
The thing with baseball is, there's sometimes one or two teams that feel like they should be in the playoffs. Sometimes though, like last year, there's really no teams that deserved to be in over another team, maybe the Rangers or something, but still - a stretch. It really varies each year, which makes it difficult to make a case for expanding the playoffs.
The two things I would do with baseball are:
1) Go back to two divisions. It seems like there's often an undeserving team in a division that gets in over a team who misses the playoffs in another division (ahem 1999 Reds.)
2) Expand the first round of games to the best of 7. It was a horrible idea for the NBA, but a great idea for baseball. I mean, you play 162 games ALL year, only to be able to be eliminated by a short first series? That's really lame to me.
One thing that does bug be about the MLB playoffs is, its sooo abbreviated compared to the regular season. In the NBA, you have to win 16 games to win it all, and its an 82 game season. In football you have to win either 3 or 4, after a 16 game season. In college basketball, you have to win 6 after around a 30-33 game season. In MLB? You have to win all of 11 games after a 162 game season.
It just seems anticlimactic, and often the best teams get eliminated by an abbreviated playoff series or something, then we get wonky lopsided World Series', which up until last year had like a 20-1 advantage in favor of the winner in series wins versus losses over about 5 years.
I wouldn't mind at all cutting the regular season back and allowing 6 teams in on each side in some ways, but MLB is so tradition heavy, that will never happen, so at least they could expand the first round to best of 7.