Cooper: Playoff Randomness Should Be Embraced, Not Feared

Image credit: Joe Musgrove (Photo by Dustin Satloff/Getty Images)

The howls of outrage began the moment the 111-win Dodgers were bounced from the playoffs, on the same day the 101-win Braves exited stage left. The 101-win Mets never even made it to the League Division Series and neither did the 93-win Cardinals.

The expansion to 12 playoff teams has left many baseball fans wondering if the regular season is being devalued. And the concern is that “worthy” teams are being knocked out by teams that were demonstrably worse over the course of a lengthy six-month 162-game season.

And so the suggestions have quickly arrived to suggest that the system needs to be tweaked to ensure the best regular season teams are more able to advance.

Please stop. The chance for underdogs to win is a feature of the playoffs, not a bug.

We should be incredibly thankful that an 87-win Phillies team can vanquish two better teams to get to the National League Championship Series. Unless you’re a Dodgers fan, you should be thrilled that the Padres can prove they can take on and vanquish the Dodgers in a best-of-five series.

Without this, modern-day baseball would be doomed to a monotonous never-ending run of big market/big-spending teams battling for titles while the rest of the league muddles along. With it, we are in a world where 21 different MLB teams have made it to the World Series in the 21st century and 15 different teams have won the World Series this century.

If baseball focused even more heavily on the 162-game season to determine champions, much of what we focus on right now would be rendered pointless. If you are worried about teams failing to try under the present system, imagine what it would be like in the AL or NL West without a multi-tiered playoff system and wild cards?

At the end of July, the Dodgers led the National League West by 12 games. The division race was over, and if the focus was the regular season, it was time for the Padres to fold up and go home. But with wild cards to chase, San Diego added Juan Soto, Josh Hader, Josh Bell and more. 

That did nothing to help them catch the Dodgers—the Padres finished 22 games back. But it did allow San Diego to prevail in a five-game series where randomness played a much larger role.

The Phillies kept adding to their team at the trade deadline as well, even though on Aug. 2, Philadelphia was 10 games out in the NL East. The Mariners added Luis Castillo, even though they trailed the Astros by 11 games.

This is the point of wild cards and expanded playoffs. Big spending teams have plenty of ways to buy success during the regular season, but they can much more easily be eliminated in a short postseason series. If the focus is the regular season, success becomes much more a matter of who has the biggest payroll. If the playoffs are expanded, more teams have a reason to keep trying, and fanbases maintain hope.

The Dodgers are both extremely well run and willing to spend on payroll. They win 90-plus games every year. They have averaged 99 wins per season (on a percentage basis) over the past 10 years. The Dodgers have won 100-plus games in four of the past six seasons, as have the Astros. The Yankees have done so six times in the 21st century.

If a team needs to be better than these clubs over the course of a 162-game season, half of the league has lost its reasons to try. The task is too tough.

Winning 100-plus games in a given season is something that’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience for many teams. The Royals last did it in 1977. The Twins have done it once since 1971, as have the Tigers. The Rays and Diamondbacks have won 100 once in team history. The Pirates haven’t done it in over a century. The Nationals/Expos, Rangers, Blue Jays and Rockies have never done it. The last time the Orioles did it, Cal Ripken Jr. was a minor leaguer.

This isn’t new. Baseball has never been a fair game. 

Teams with larger financial resources have always had the ability to make mistakes that smaller-revenue teams can’t stomach. And for anyone who hopes that the trends of the past 100-plus years of baseball will be reversed, keep dreaming. The franchise value of the Yankees, Dodgers, Red Sox, Mets and others depends in part on their massive financial advantages and much larger revenue streams. It’s impossible to imagine that those teams will ever willingly adopt a system of revenue sharing that would truly level the playing field. After all, they paid handsomely to buy teams with those advantages.

 

But the playoffs do provide the ability for upstarts to get their moments of delirium even if they can’t match the bigger teams in regular season wins.

We see how it works in other sports that don’t spend a month on playoffs. The top soccer leagues choose their champion based purely on who wins the most in the regular season. The best (which usually means biggest spending) teams win time after time with mind-numbing regularity. In the English Premier League, 16 of the last 18 titles have been won by three teams (Manchester United, Manchester City and Chelsea). In the Bundesliga, Bayern Munich has won the last 10 titles and 16 of the last 20. Real Madrid and Barcelona have won 16 of the last 18 La Liga titles. For fans of many teams in those leagues, the hope is you may witness the unexpected title once in a lifetime.

And that’s what we used to have in baseball. Before the League Championship Series was introduced in 1969, the Yankees were the AL’s representative in the World Series 29 times in the 48 seasons—that’s 60% of the time—between New York’s first pennant in 1921 and 1968, the last season without divisions.

Nowadays, if you’re a Padres, Guardians, Royals or Twins fan, you don’t have to count on beating the Yankees or Astros or Dodgers over the course of a full season. You can steal a series in October and produce memories that last forever.

As long as the economic structure of the sport remains unbalanced, it’s the best way to give fans everywhere a reason to care. What’s happened this October is what the sport needs, not something that needs a tweak.