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It remains to be seen who will represent the National League in the World Series but one thing is for certain: It won’t be any of that league’s elite teams from the regular season.
While the National League had three teams win at least 101 games this season the Mets were chased from the postseason after just two losses in the Wild Card round and the Braves and Dodgers followed them out the door in the Division Series, leaving the 89-win Padres and the 87-win Phillies left to contend for a pennant. Those two teams finished a combined 36 games back of the winning teams in their respective divisions this season, but each eliminated their respective champion by winning three out of four games in October.
Inferior teams qualifying for the postseason is nothing new, of course. Even before baseball’s new postseason format there were nine teams in MLB history that had qualified for the postseason by winning 85 games or fewer, including three that went on to reach the World Series and two that won it. MLB’s new postseason format for 2022, however, creates the possibility for inferior teams to completely take over the month of October.
Under the previous ten-team postseason format the fourth and fifth-best teams from each league reached the postseason, but immediately played each other. As such, the weakest possible League Championship Series matchup was a #3 seeded team, still a division winner, facing a #5 seed that had won the Wild Card Game and upset the #1 seed in the LDS round. Under the new format, however, the fifth and sixth best teams from each league advance to the postseason and play on different sides of the bracket, creating a possible scenario where two non-division winning teams eliminate all of the division champions before the LCS round. It might have seemed like a far-fetched scenario two weeks ago, but now it’s happened in the new format’s first season.
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The notion that a short series can determine a league’s top team has always been an illusion. In 2014 Daniel Meyer of Beyond the Box Score wrote that even baseball’s 162-game regular season often isn’t a large enough sample to guarantee that the best team will finish with the best record. Upsets will happen from time to time even in a seven-game series, and the odds of them happening increase significantly in five and even three game sets. While short series generate more winner-take-all games and must-see television, they certainly open the door for the better team to be eliminated more often.
It’s worth noting that other leagues handle this randomness differently. The Korea Baseball Organization solves this problem in a unique way: Five of their ten teams reach postseason play, which is structured in a gauntlet model. The fifth and fourth-best teams meet in a two-game series where the fifth seed has to win both games to advance. The winner goes on to play a five-game series against the third-best team, with the winner advancing to play the second seed and so on. In concept this would create a challenge for the top overall seed, as they’ve been idle for weeks before the first day of the Korean Series. In practice, however, this format greatly rewards regular season winners. The KBO’s top regular season team has won 18 of the last 20 Korean Series championships.
The MLB postseason was never a perfect or even a particularly good method of determining the sport’s best team, but it does create compelling drama during the month of October. For as long as TV networks are willing to pay billions to cover those games, MLB will almost certainly always prioritize more postseason games over a structure that fairly distributes championships.
