Manfred: 16-team postseason likely to stay as “an overwhelming majority” of owners endorsed the concept before COVID

The Gray Eagle

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This guy sucks so much.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/10/20/sports/sale-mets-steve-cohen-approved-by-major-league-baseballs-ownership-committee/
Ahead of a World Series capping the pandemic-shortened season, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred said he hopes to keep two of this year’s innovations: expanded playoffs and starting extra innings with a runner on second base.

“People were wildly unenthusiastic about the changes. And then when they saw them in action, they were much more positive,” Manfred said Tuesday during an interview with the Associated Press.
At least he "only" wants to expand to 14 teams:
Even before the pandemic, Manfred advocated a future expansion of the playoffs to 14 teams.
“I like the idea of, and I’m choosing my words carefully here, an expanded playoff format,” Manfred said. “I don’t think we would do 16 like we did this year. I think we do have to be cognizant of making sure that we preserve the importance of our regular season. But I think something beyond the 10 that we were at would be a good change.”
 

VORP Speed

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The runner on 2nd thing for regular season games worked great and was an improvement. Who benefits from 16 inning midweek night games?

14 seems like a hair too many, but a 12 team post-season with 4 wild-cards per league and a 3 game wild-card round would be great. Even better if they work a double-header into the WC round.
 

amRadio

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I think reasonable people can disagree. It's akin to a shoot out in soccer, it's not pure baseball like the first nine innings, but it doesn't occur in the post-season, right? That's fine.

I also like the idea of going to 14 teams in the post-season in light of his comment about respecting the regular season. I hope the first round either doesn't feature division winners or is stretched out to a 5 game series. More baseball is generally good for people who like baseball and playoff baseball is the best baseball.

Just feel like I should say the word 'baseball' one more time before I close this out.
 

E5 Yaz

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I think reasonable people can disagree. It's akin to a shoot out in soccer, it's not pure baseball like the first nine innings, but it doesn't occur in the post-season, right? That's fine.
Unless, say, your team misses out on a playoff spot because of makeshift rules
 

54thMA

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The runner on 2nd thing for regular season games worked great and was an improvement. Who benefits from 16 inning midweek night games?

14 seems like a hair too many, but a 12 team post-season with 4 wild-cards per league and a 3 game wild-card round would be great. Even better if they work a double-header into the WC round.
What I've always loved about baseball is a good old fashioned pennant race, two or three teams fighting down the stretch to win the division and play the other division winner for a chance to go to the WS, there have been some truly great ones throughout the history of baseball, not to mention some massive collapses under the pressure of a pennant race (hello 1978).

12 teams making the playoffs takes that off the table, now it's just a question of who gets HFA vs who actually gets in.

Ok, I'll go tell those pesky neighborhood kids to get off my lawn now, then follow up by shaking my fist at a passing cloud.
 

Red(s)HawksFan

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I think reasonable people can disagree. It's akin to a shoot out in soccer, it's not pure baseball like the first nine innings, but it doesn't occur in the post-season, right? That's fine.
Shootouts don't happen in soccer post-season? Could have sworn a World Cup or two came down to shootouts. I'm not a soccer fan so maybe I'm confused.

I think the concerns over extra inning games are completely overblown. How often do they happen over the course of a 162 game season? And how many of those last more than 10-11 innings?

Beyond the Box Score did a study a couple years ago. In the 5.5 seasons they studied (2012 to halfway through 2017) there were 1200 extra inning games. That was 8.7% of the total games played. 43.7% of extra inning games ended after the 10th. 81.4% were over after the 12th. Just 4.8% of extra inning games went beyond 14 innings. That means that it was roughly 0.4% of games last longer than 14 innings, or roughly 10 a year for the whole league. So at best, two thirds of the league's teams might play a game that goes longer than 14 innings.

Adding runners in extras is a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. It was fine for a COVID shortened season. It's needless for a normal season.
 

Lose Remerswaal

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Agreed. And if you want to make a rule that a team can add X number of players for X number of days after a game of more than X innings, that might be a good solution to the overworked team issue. 3, 3, and 13 might work
 

Rovin Romine

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I think reasonable people can disagree. It's akin to a shoot out in soccer, it's not pure baseball like the first nine innings, but it doesn't occur in the post-season, right? That's fine.
I'm not a fan - I like the open-endedness of the extra inning games.

As for the playoffs, I dislike the current format. Winning the division and/or having the best record in the league needs to mean something more than just a seed advantage. I liked the concept of a single single WC game format that forced the winner to burn their best SP before a series with the division leaders.
 

scottyno

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Shootouts don't happen in soccer post-season? Could have sworn a World Cup or two came down to shootouts. I'm not a soccer fan so maybe I'm confused.
Overtime rules in post-season soccer sometimes try make it less likely to have a shootout, but they still do happen. In hockey playoffs they don't happen.
 

Max Power

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I'm not a fan - I like the open-endedness of the extra inning games.

As for the playoffs, I dislike the current format. Winning the division and/or having the best record in the league needs to mean something more than just a seed advantage.
That's what the 14 team plan does. It adds a couple of Wild Card teams and has them play against each other for a shot at one of the division winners, who all get a bye.
 

Rovin Romine

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That's what the 14 team plan does. It adds a couple of Wild Card teams and has them play against each other for a shot at one of the division winners, who all get a bye.
Ah - good to know. I had thought it was going to be like this season, just taking the highest ranked teams in each league and seeding them.
 

jon abbey

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That's what the 14 team plan does. It adds a couple of Wild Card teams and has them play against each other for a shot at one of the division winners, who all get a bye.
This doesn't make sense, 7 teams per league would mean just one bye with the other six teams playing for three spots in that round, including two division winners.

Manfred doesn't seem like he actually wants 14 teams in his more recent comments, I bet they will settle on 12 (2 byes, 2 play-in three game series per league).
 

Max Power

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This doesn't make sense, 7 teams per league would mean just one bye with the other six teams playing for three spots in that round, including two division winners.

Manfred doesn't seem like he actually wants 14 teams in his more recent comments, I bet they will settle on 12 (2 byes, 2 play-in three game series per league).
7 teams = 3 byes + 4 wild cards in a mini tournament to play the top division winner.
 

Red(s)HawksFan

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7 teams = 3 byes + 4 wild cards in a mini tournament to play the top division winner.
So the wildcard is two rounds to determine one winner to face the #1 seed? Single game or 3 game series? The three teams with a bye shouldn't be asked to sit around for a week just to get this done. Far more efficient to give one bye and have the other six teams play 3 game series to whittle the field to four total teams. Season ends on a Sunday, wild card series start on Tuesday, LDS begin on Friday. Top seed gets four days off which is enough time for them to rest their entire rotation without having to compromise regular season games to "line pitchers up".

Or just keep it the way it is (2019 format, not 2020) and quit fucking around with the post-season.
 

Max Power

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Single games with no travel day. It's 3 days of waiting around and a huge advantage for winning a division. It was the Bob Costas plan that he cribbed from Jerry Reinsdorf.
 

cannonball 1729

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I still kind of hate the one-game playoff thing. It's fine as a division/WC tiebreaker when teams actually end up tied, but as a customary playoff format, there's something weird about it. It feels like skipping to game 7 without the buildup that makes a game 7 exciting, or skipping to a division tiebreaker without the two weeks of buildup that make a tiebreaker feel like the culmination of something. It's just manufactured excitement.

Besides, baseball is a game that works best as a series. Everything in the history of baseball has been geared toward the idea of winning a series. Winning a single game just means you have a good ace.

I would love if they would expand the wildcard playoff to a best-of-three - they could even have one of the days be a double-header to condense the timeframe. (Although if they're doing 14 teams, they're not going to expand the number of games.) If not that, I'd rather they at least do an advantaged playoff, where the lesser team needs to win two games and the better team needs to win one, like the NBA did this year with the 8/9 playoffs. There should be some value in finishing with a higher record.
 

trs

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Somewhat tangential to this discussion is the American obsession with "playoffs." In most other countries, league play and any tournament or playoff is separate. I'm not saying that I support this, but at this point, with a 16-team playoff, you're essentially creating a tournament in which the top 50% of the teams are eligible. No longer is it really a playoff between the very top teams of different leagues. I'm just not sure you can have both scenarios.

If you look at the season as a 162 game tournament in which the team at the top wins, well then there's no reason for further games. You would want a balanced schedule of course, and this is what happens in most "leagues" in all team sports around the world. Then, there is a separate tournament involving even more teams that works somewhat similarly to our playoff system in the States. None of this is new for many of you, but it's almost as if our attempt to combine two different ideas into one is going to backfire a bit. The season was meant to show over a large sample size who is the best team, second best, third best, etc. If all it needs to do is separate the top half from the bottom half, we surely don't need so many games, as evidenced by the lack of attention given to NBA and NHL regular seasons that don't feature marquee match-ups. Sure seeding matters a bit as does home/away (outside a bubble), but is that worth months of games?

Anyway, I'm not sure a solution, but a hybrid tournament/season approach seems to be getting the worst of both worlds, the "grind" of a league winner becomes less important if you just need to fall in the top 50%, and a tournament with so many teams will feature teams that aren't really that good, reducing the appeal of the best playing the best. I personally like the "grind" aspect of a league winner, but you lose game 7s or elimination games to a certain extent. 162 games is a lot, and I wonder how much the 154-162 game season was built initially on a barnstorming mentality to collect gate-receipts that just isn't necessary anymore with TV revenues being far more important. Obviously any change to that would be drastic and would essentially change the sport, but if we keep expanding the playoffs, then we really run the risk of the regular season just becoming a statistics generator.

Thought Experiment-style Proposal that Would Never Happen:

Imagine mimicking a European-style basketball/soccer season. You would have a fully balanced season between all the teams. Each team plays the other team for a 2 game series home and home over the course of the year = 116 games (I think). You would play 4 games a week for 29 weeks, every Wednesday and Thursday and Saturday and Sunday, and at the end of the season you had a winner. The top 16 teams would then be eligible for the "tournament" the following season, making teams have to sustain good play and keep players. The tournament would be played alongside the regular season on Friday evenings. You would have around 25 weeks to play with, so about 25 possible games. The first round would be 3 games, second round 5, and last two rounds 7. Once you're out, you're out and you play fewer games. It would allow teams to run out their ace (if that position still existed...) every Friday if they wanted in the tournament, but at the cost of being able to use him in the "league." You'd have "must-see" baseball all season long. On Friday evenings! Hell we could have a Redzone baseball channel!

It'd be a hot mess and totally change the sport. I don't think I'd like it, but it was fun to think about for a few minutes...
 

Philip Jeff Frye

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I still kind of hate the one-game playoff thing. It's fine as a division/WC tiebreaker when teams actually end up tied, but as a customary playoff format, there's something weird about it. It feels like skipping to game 7 without the buildup that makes a game 7 exciting, or skipping to a division tiebreaker without the two weeks of buildup that make a tiebreaker feel like the culmination of something. It's just manufactured excitement.
Exactly. They want every year to have the Shot Heard Round the World or Bucky Bleeping Dent, but those things are only special if they happen occasionally, not if they happen all the time.
 

E5 Yaz

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If your team is missing out on a 16 out of 30 team field because of the makeshift rules, I think there's a good argument that you didn't belong in the first place...
True ... but I'm against the 8 teams in each league playoffs as well, so there you go
 

jon abbey

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The current (2019) five team system has two huge issues: one game elimination is too random and dependent on your single best SP, and if the two best teams are in the same division, they still play each other in the LDS and not the LCS.

So I would suggest six teams from each league, three division winners and three wild cards but then order all six totally by record (despite the unbalanced schedule, although I would try to balance it more if possible), The top two get byes even if #2 is a wild card, whoever has the two best records. #3 and #4 host best of 3 series against #6 and #5, three straight days, Mon/Tues/Wed and the LDS starts Friday so the two teams with byes have an entirely fully rested pitching staff going in, four days off between games. That is a lot of incentive to get into the top two in the league in the regular season.