2023 MLB Postseason Discussion

[Underachiever]

Forget the division, just be a wild card. Get swept to end the season, win 84 games. Get a bullpen made of guys who barely were with the team long enough to be playoff-eligible. In game 7, give the ball to a rookie who was 3-9 with a 5.73 ERA. The formula is the equivalent of a wapituli made in a garbage can at a frat party, but it got them there.

[SomewhereInTime]

There's no recipe for postseason success.  Its not power hitters, contact hitters, great bullpen, great rotation, etc.  Its not getting hot at the end of the season. It's mostly just randomness.

[Fear The Chorizo]

4 minutes ago, SomewhereInTime said:

There's no recipe for postseason success.  Its not power hitters, contact hitters, great bullpen, great rotation, etc.  Its not getting hot at the end of the season. It's mostly just randomness.

eh, most people figured the NL World Series rep would be from the NL West or NL East this season ;)

It is total randomness once the postseason starts, which is why I think if baseball wants to get back to feeling like one of the best teams each year wins the World Series, they need to reduce the playoff field to put more value on regular season success.

[yourout]

1 minute ago, Fear The Chorizo said:

eh, most people figured the NL World Series rep would be from the NL West or NL East this season ;)

It is total randomness once the postseason starts, which is why I think if baseball wants to get back to feeling like one of the best teams each year wins the World Series, they need to reduce the playoff field to put more value on regular season success.

Yeah but that won't happen.

$$$ trumps everything and the more teams the more $$$.

[torts]

So glad Arizona is in the world series!  Smoke em if ya got em!

[nate82]

20 minutes ago, LouisEly said:

Bites at the apple!

(*ducks and runs for cover*)

No we need an offense like the Phillies otherwise you can’t make the WS!

[dlk9s]

Brewers Blessing lives

[HarryDoyle]

5 hours ago, Fear The Chorizo said:

eh, most people figured the NL World Series rep would be from the NL West or NL East this season ;)

It is total randomness once the postseason starts, which is why I think if baseball wants to get back to feeling like one of the best teams each year wins the World Series, they need to reduce the playoff field to put more value on regular season success.

Yay, expanded playoffs.

[dlk9s]

So what I gather from this thread is that people want MLB to sort by wins, crown a champ? Cool.

[Fear The Chorizo]

18 minutes ago, dlk9s said:

So what I gather from this thread is that people want MLB to sort by wins, crown a champ? Cool.

Not really, just get back to valuing teams that perform the best over a regular season that has 162 games played instead of pushing for an NFL or NBA style format that plays 17 or 82 games and let's half the league into the postseason.

Not saying go back to what baseball was like when just the two division Champs made the playoffs and played a best of 5 series to see who made the world series, but 12 out of 30 teams making the baseball playoffs is too many.

[SF70]

20 minutes ago, Fear The Chorizo said:

Not really, just get back to valuing teams that perform the best over a regular season that has 162 games played instead of pushing for an NFL or NBA style format that plays 17 or 82 games and let's half the league into the postseason.

Not saying go back to what baseball was like when just the two division Champs made the playoffs and played a best of 5 series to see who made the world series, but 12 out of 30 teams making the baseball playoffs is too many.

If anything the owners will add 2 more teams to the postseason, maybe as early as the next CBA.

It’s not just the extra money, it also gives more SM teams hope for a WS without having to address the revenue disparities in MLB.

 

[kestrel79]

Great games, wow. Congrats to AZ. 

 

Phils going to Wheeler in the 7th, do you think CC would of made a move like that for us in game 7 with Woody or Burnes? Or would he of went to Abner?

Is Ginkle AZ's setup man? Cool seeing their manager use him "early" in the 7th too when the Phils started to get something goin.

AZ is proof a team built like us this year can make the WS, just gotta get hot at the right time.

[Brock Beauchamp]

1 hour ago, Fear The Chorizo said:

Not really, just get back to valuing teams that perform the best over a regular season that has 162 games played instead of pushing for an NFL or NBA style format that plays 17 or 82 games and let's half the league into the postseason.

Not saying go back to what baseball was like when just the two division Champs made the playoffs and played a best of 5 series to see who made the world series, but 12 out of 30 teams making the baseball playoffs is too many.

Maybe 12 out of 30 is too many but if MLB expands to 32, as they probably should have done a decade ago, is 12 out of 32 too many?

I feel like 12 out of 32 is a pretty good ratio. Maybe a bit on the high side but definitely within reason.

[Fear The Chorizo]

10 minutes ago, Brock Beauchamp said:

Maybe 12 out of 30 is too many but if MLB expands to 32, as they probably should have done a decade ago, is 12 out of 32 too many?

I feel like 12 out of 32 is a pretty good ratio. Maybe a bit on the high side but definitely within reason.

For a league with a 162 game regular season, yes I think 12 out of 32 would still be too many.  I get that $$$ rules all and shoving as many teams into whatever weird playoff format they have likely wins out, but that doesn't mean I like it.  Baseball is random over short bits of games - had MLB found a way to get the Athletics in this year's postseason, honestly they wouldn't have much worse odds to make the WS than the two teams that are in it.  My point is for as random as baseball is for two weeks here and there, the best teams tend to wade through all of that over the course of 162 games - so a reduced playoff format with fewer teams would still lead to random playoff outcomes, but it would exclude more of the teams that just shouldn't be given the opportunity for winning a World Series based on their body of work over a 6+ month regular season playing almost everyday.

If playoffs expand further, are we then playing two months of postseason baseball, with the world series routinely being decided in between snow flurries and cold/rainy November nights if the wrong teams make the playoffs?  Had the Twins gone on a run, they'd be playing home World Series games next week where the high temps are barely above freezing.  Expanding the playoffs further would put those games another week into winter.

The current playoff format makes more sense to me if they aren't already playing 162 regular season games.  any sort of further expansion should demand the regular season be pared back down to 154.

To me, baseball is different than the other major sports, and regular season success should carry more weight due to the marathon that it is.

[OldSchoolSnapper]

I thought they had it perfect with 10, #4 and #5 having the play-in. It kept just the right amount of competition going through September and meant teams like ours didn't have to win their division. With just 4 there were not as many races going to the end. 

It's too many now. That should be obvious when teams can't get 35k into the gates for a Wild Card game. The difference in mood between the '11 series with the DBacks and the '18 with the Rockies and this one was staggering. Some of that is fatigue but some of it, IMO, is "wake me up for the LCS."

[sveumrules]

 

15 minutes ago, Fear The Chorizo said:

If playoffs expand further, are we then playing two months of postseason baseball,

They could expand the playoff field to seven or eight teams per league and it wouldn’t add any calendar time, just drop the bye from two to one or zero teams.

Now if they did that, and switched the opening round to best of five and DS to best of seven (to help out those better 162 game teams) you’re talking four extra games, or going from what is currently a four week tournament to five weeks, still well short of two months.

[sveumrules]

11 minutes ago, OldSchoolSnapper said:

I thought they had it perfect with 10, #4 and #5 having the play-in. It kept just the right amount of competition going through September and meant teams like ours didn't have to win their division. With just 4 there were not as many races going to the end. 

It's too many now. That should be obvious when teams can't get 35k into the gates for a Wild Card game. The difference in mood between the '11 series with the DBacks and the '18 with the Rockies and this one was staggering. Some of that is fatigue but some of it, IMO, is "wake me up for the LCS."

I preferred the format with fewer teams, too, though it still kicked out it’s fair share of upsets, long shots, underdogs, didn’t even deserve to be there in the first place, whatever one wants to call them, WS Champions.

That the Brewers have essentially ascended for many to the level of the Favre/Rodgers Packers, or Giannis Bucks - wake me up at the Conference Finals - is pretty remarkable all things considered.

The ship sailed on the World Series pitting the two best teams against one another to crown the One True Champion a long time ago. Capitalism demands that we will only get farther away from that ideal as time goes on.

I’ve accepted the amplified randomness of the postseason as an inevitability and look forward to how it specifically unfolds each autumn.

[jerichoholicninja]

Take out the off days in the middle of series. As it is now a team can ride it's 2 or 3 best BP arms and 2 or 3 best SP and not have to worry about using their bottom of the roster trash. That is the biggest difference between the regular season and the post season. Building a team with depth like the Brewers typically do wins you a lot of regular season games but means nothing in the playoffs.

[owbc]

I don't care how big the playoff field is as long as they play 7 game series from the DS onward. It's far, far, far past time to make the division series best of 7. I don't really care about the wild card rounds, they can let as many teams in as they want as long as they stop letting the top teams get eliminated in 3 games.

What Philly was doing in the early rounds was clearly unsustainable. Pure home run derby. Didn't they score something like 17 straight runs off of home runs? In a 3-game or 5-game series you can sometimes get away with that, but the D'backs to their credit starting pitching around the top heavy portion of that lineup and nobody else could pick up the slack. Especially when the pressure was on to get that last win. We got robbed out of PHI-ATL not being a 7-game series, things might have gone differently if that was the case. 

The Diamondbacks played better baseball, period. They had better at-bats, they manufactured runs, they played nearly perfect defense, and they had a huge, huge advantage at the back end of the bullpen. Paul Sewald throwing 8 scoreless innings with 6 saves is the type of postseason that we have dreamed about with either Hader or Williams. Making that trade at the deadline was undoubtedly the move that put them over the top. And Texas make a big effort to improve at the deadline as well, even if Scherzer hasn't done much. You need your Sept/Oct roster to be considerably better than your April/May roster.

[Fear The Chorizo]

23 minutes ago, owbc said:

I don't care how big the playoff field is as long as they play 7 game series from the DS onward. It's far, far, far past time to make the division series best of 7. I don't really care about the wild card rounds, they can let as many teams in as they want as long as they stop letting the top teams get eliminated in 3 games.

What Philly was doing in the early rounds was clearly unsustainable. Pure home run derby. Didn't they score something like 17 straight runs off of home runs? In a 3-game or 5-game series you can sometimes get away with that, but the D'backs to their credit starting pitching around the top heavy portion of that lineup and nobody else could pick up the slack. Especially when the pressure was on to get that last win. We got robbed out of PHI-ATL not being a 7-game series, things might have gone differently if that was the case. 

The Diamondbacks played better baseball, period. They had better at-bats, they manufactured runs, they played nearly perfect defense, and they had a huge, huge advantage at the back end of the bullpen. Paul Sewald throwing 8 scoreless innings with 6 saves is the type of postseason that we have dreamed about with either Hader or Williams. Making that trade at the deadline was undoubtedly the move that put them over the top. And Texas make a big effort to improve at the deadline as well, even if Scherzer hasn't done much. You need your Sept/Oct roster to be considerably better than your April/May roster.

Generally agreed, although the Rangers were among the best teams in the AL throughout the first few months of the season before scuffling in July/August badly enough for the Astros to overtake them in the division standings.  They very much deserved a playoff berth this season.  Despite me being happy the Dbacks beat the teams they did to reach the WS (Brewers are the exception, obviously), I don't think their regular season body of work should've landed them a playoff berth.  3 wildcard teams in a three division league of 15 teams is too many, as evidenced by 5 teams being within 2 games of one another for WC spots #2 and 3 in the NL, all with low to mid 80s win totals.

With the current postseason format, unless MLB wants the entire world series to be played in November each season there isn't time to have 7 game division series when factoring in off days between rounds.  One argument could be to reduce those off days, but with the total number of teams in the bracket there has to be a pretty concrete schedule on when each round ends/begins, which winds up leading to many more offdays than necessary if series wrap up quickly.  

[owbc]

43 minutes ago, Fear The Chorizo said:

Generally agreed, although the Rangers were among the best teams in the AL throughout the first few months of the season before scuffling in July/August badly enough for the Astros to overtake them in the division standings.  They very much deserved a playoff berth this season.  Despite me being happy the Dbacks beat the teams they did to reach the WS (Brewers are the exception, obviously), I don't think their regular season body of work should've landed them a playoff berth.  3 wildcard teams in a three division league of 15 teams is too many, as evidenced by 5 teams being within 2 games of one another for WC spots #2 and 3 in the NL, all with low to mid 80s win totals.

With the current postseason format, unless MLB wants the entire world series to be played in November each season there isn't time to have 7 game division series when factoring in off days between rounds.  One argument could be to reduce those off days, but with the total number of teams in the bracket there has to be a pretty concrete schedule on when each round ends/begins, which winds up leading to many more offdays than necessary if series wrap up quickly.  

I agree that they need to reduce off days in the postseason. Other leagues have figured out that you don't need to pre-schedule the entire postseason. There's nothing wrong with one league being ahead of the other if there are sweeps. The NBA often has games different rounds occurring simultaneously. 

They also need to start the postseason on October 1. If we've accepted that we're never going to drop below 162, then schedule a few doubleheaders.

[Jimbo]

On 10/24/2023 at 10:30 PM, Underachiever said:

Forget the division, just be a wild card. Get swept to end the season, win 84 games. Get a bullpen made of guys who barely were with the team long enough to be playoff-eligible. In game 7, give the ball to a rookie who was 3-9 with a 5.73 ERA. The formula is the equivalent of a wapituli made in a garbage can at a frat party, but it got them there.

This is a bigger travesty than the 1987 Twins, getting into the playoffs and winning the WS with the AL's 5th best record (Brewers with a better season).  Something I still haven't totally gotten over.

 

[Brewcrew82]

Wow. Corey Seager!

[HarryDoyle]

How are those base stealing oven mitts even legal?

[Brewcrew82]

Wow. Great game. Hopefully it's like this for the rest of the series.