Most Major League Baseball (MLB) teams will play their open days games for their 2012-13 season this week. One of the biggest changes for this season is the addition of one wild-card team to MLB’s playoffs for both the National and American Leagues. Critics of adding new wild-card teams focus on two main faults with this postseason change. First, baseball is devaluing its regular season by adding more teams that can make the playoffs. Second, adding more wild-card teams would eliminate the drama that occurred at the end of the last regular season where the Tampa Bay Rays and the St. Louis Cardinals overtook the Boston Red Sox and the Atlanta Braves on the final day of the season to win the wild-cards for their leagues, respectively. The late seasons surges by the Rays and the Cardinals and swoons by the Red Sox and Braves were the central storyline of the 2011-12 regular season. With the addition of the new wild-card teams, the Rays, Cardinals, Red Sox, and Braves would all have made the playoffs making the regular season much less exciting.
Did MLB then devalue the regular season and make a mistake by adding a new wild-card team for each league? We realize we need to come up with a definition of what adds “value” to the regular season. For the purposes of this blog post, we wanted to use a definition of value that could apply to multiple sports in different leagues. One of, if not the only, thing that regular seasons across sports have in common is that teams compete to have a chance to participate in the postseason and win a league’s overall championship title. Therefore, we determined that regular seasons have a increasing value to a particular team based on the length of time it has an opportunity to compete in the postseason for an overall league championship.
The “for a championship part” is crucial because of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) in college football. The BCS guarantees that only two teams will compete for the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) national title each season. Most of the supporters and opponents of the BCS agree that its main appeal is that this structure makes the regular season “matter”. No team has ever had more than two losses and competed in the national championship game. In most years, teams in the title game only have one or zero losses. Because a team has to win virtually all of its regular season games, BCS proponents contend this makes the regular season matter more in college football than any other major sport. In fact, the NCAA’s website states, “NCAAFOOTBALL.COM - Where every game counts.”
This contention and the website are wrong. In fact, the exact opposite is true as most game do not really “count” and the regular season means the least in college football than it does in any other major sport. By definition, virtually half of the teams in the FBS lose their first game of the year (it is not exactly half as some FBS teams play teams in the Football Championship Subdivision). Of the 120 teams in the FBS, only five teams had one loss and only eleven teams had two losses or fewer by the end of the 2011 season. This means that most FBS teams have no chance of playing in the FBS national championship game well before the season ends. This also means that much of the regular season does not matter for most FBS teams because they lose their ability to compete for a national championship so early in the regular season as compared to other sports. Therefore, the NCAA slogan should be “NCAAFOOTBALL.COM – Where every game counts for a very small percentage of teams.”
If MLB’s goal is to make the regular season “matter” more then adding more teams that compete in postseason (and thus compete for a World Series title) is the right decision. Not only do more teams compete in the playoffs but also more teams will be able to compete for playoff spots for a longer portion of the season. And its not as if regular season will lack for drama if previous seasons are any indication of future close finishes. At the end of the 2010 season, there was a one game difference between the teams that finished in second place (Boston Red Sox) and third place (Chicago White Sox) for the AL wild-card (i.e. the teams that would be competing for the final playoff spots with MLB’s revised playoff structure). At the end of the 2009 season, there was one-a-half game difference between the second place (Texas Rangers) and third place (Detroit Tigers) teams for the AL wild-card and an one game difference between the second place (San Francisco Giants) and third place (Miami Marlins) teams for the NL wild-card.
There could be many reasons to dislike adding playoff teams to MLB’s postseason but devaluing the regular season is not one of them.
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