One-Game Baseball Playoffs Are Complete and Utter Lunacy

How can the equivalent of a 5-minute NFL overtime period determine what a 162-game season couldn’t?

TUESDAY MARKS THE BEGINNING OF THE 2019 MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL PLAYOFFS. Over the next month or so, one lucky team will win 11 more games (or 12!) and be crowned 2019 World Series Champion. And it all starts today with the one-game Wildcard Round.

The Milwaukee Brewers and Washington Nationals play Tuesday night in the National League, while the Tampa Bay Rays and Oakland As play Wednesday in the AL. It will be a wild couple days of one-off playoff baseball. It’s two Game 7s right out of the gates, with each team using their best pitchers and throwing everything they’ve got to stave off elimination before the playoffs even get going.

It will be gut wrenching — impossible to watch, but even harder to turn away. It’s sure to be scintillating baseball.

There’s just one problem: it’s also sheer lunacy.

The MLB playoffs are already a complete crap shoot, especially compared to the other major professional sports. After a long, grueling 162-game baseball season, playoff series are just seven, five, or even one game(s) long. To wit:

• Basketball playoffs are seven-game series, compared to an 82-game schedule. That means a basketball playoff series measures 8.5% of a season. The same is true for hockey.
• Football is just a one-game playoff, but that’s up against a 16-game regular season. One game is still 6.3% of the season’s length.
• A seven-game baseball series measures just 4.3% of a 162-game season. The Divisional Round is even shorter at just 3.1%, and the one-game Wildcard is a measly 0.6% of the season.

It gets worse. Baseball playoff teams are very close by record. The Rays, As, Braves, Nationals, and Cardinals all finished with between 91 and 97 wins. They each won between 56.2 and 59.9% of their games. These teams are 3% better or worse than each other, or less.

Compare that to other sports. An NFL playoff often pits a 12–4 team against a 10–6 one. One of those teams won 12.5% more games! In the NBA, it would be totally normal for a first-round matchup to feature a 62–20 team against one 43–39. The 62–20 team won 23.2% more games than its opponent! That team is WAY better than the underdog.

Baseball is playing an extraordinarily long season just to find that some playoff teams are marginally better than others, then letting those teams play in uber-short playoff series to determine its champion.

How does this make sense?

But all of that is just the nature of the baseball playoff itself. Even a bunch of seven-game baseball playoff series still end up in a very coin-flippy set of results. In the modern era, 101 teams have won 100 or more games in a season, around one a year. Only 37 of those teams went on to win the World Series. These are the top 101 teams in modern baseball history, and barely a third of them won the championship! That’s bad.

Sorry for the bad news Dodgers, Astros, and Yankees fans. The MLB playoffs don’t determine the best team. They often determine the luckiest.

Of course, a one-game baseball playoff is much, much worse. The baseball regular season lasts 162 games. A one-game playoff is 1/162 of that, or 0.6%. Pretend some other sporting events finish tied. Here’s what the equivalent of a one-game playoff would look like in each sport:

• In the NBA or NHL, a one-game baseball playoff is equivalent to about half of a basketball or hockey game. It’s 24 minutes of basketball to determine a division winner from an entire season.
• In the Premier League, a one-game baseball playoff is equal to 21 minutes of play. That’s not even a full 30-minute extra time period if a game is tied.
• In the NFL, it’s just ridiculous. A one-game baseball playoff is the equivalent of two NFL teams playing a five-minute “Week 18” overtime period to determine the division winner. It’s completely ludicrous.

It’s two players tying in a 501 game of darts and choosing to play first one to three. It’s running an entire marathon to a tie, then breaking the tie with an 854-foot race. That’s not even one time all the way around a track.

And that’s what the baseball season is, really: a marathon. Teams give everything all season long, and we’re asking them to line up for a sprint once around the track to determine the entire playoff setup. It’s madness.

But wait! What about home field advantage?

The team with the better regular season record gets home field advantage in the playoffs. That’s nice. In baseball, home field is historically worth about a 3–4% advantage. For perspective, let’s say the first pitch of the game hits the visiting batter and sends him to first. It’s now a 50–50 game. Home field advantage is roughly equivalent to one runner on first in a nine-inning game. It’s minuscule and borderline meaningless.

By most advanced metrics, the Washington Nationals grade out as the second best team in the National League. They have the second best run differential in the NL by a wide margin. Other than the Dodgers, no other NL team even has a run differential as good as any one of the five American League playoff teams. The Nationals were loaded this season and had a great year, winning 93 games. One year ago, they would’ve been only two games away from having the top record in the National League.

And for their outstanding season? The Nats are rewarded with a one-game playoff lottery. But they get a 3% advantage because it’s at home! At least they do in this one. But if the Nationals survive the Brewers, they’re rewarded with a road series against the most dominant team in baseball. And if they somehow win that series, they will again be the road team in the NLCS, even though they’d be better than both teams they’d play there.

Outside of one game, the Nationals get the exact same treatment as the Milwaukee Brewers, whose +3 run differential ranked 15th in the MLB, far behind teams like the Cubs, Diamondbacks, Mets, and Red Sox that were eliminated weeks ago. The Brewers won the games and earned their spot here, but they deserve the steep road ahead. The Nationals don’t.

Here’s a novel idea — why not reseed the playoffs to reward the ones with the best records all season?

The Cardinals won their division and earned a playoff berth, but they won the worst division in baseball. They were neck-and-neck with the Brewers down to the final weekend while the rest of the National League playoff teams have been safe and sound for weeks. So why shouldn’t the Cards and Brewers play in today’s one-game playoff? By every measure we have, they are the two worst teams in the NL playoffs. Why not treat them that way?

Instead the Cardinals will sit at home watching the wildcard game, resting up while they await a matchup with the Atlanta Braves. These are the two teams everyone the NL wants to face, and somehow they get to play each other. Sure.

The wildcard round isn’t going anywhere because it means more teams make the “playoffs” and it means more eyeballs for one-night coin-flip games where every at-bat matters because one random outcome will change the entire layout of the playoffs. It makes sense.

Too much sense, apparently.

“Let’s play two,” Cubs Hall of Famer Ernie Banks once said.

Pretty sure he didn’t mean two wildcard games just to get to the real playoffs.

Random Coin-Flip Generated Playoff Predictions

Rays over As Brewers over Nationals

Twins over Yankees Astros over Rays Braves over Cardinals Brewers over Dodgers

Twins over Astros Braves over Brewers

Twins over Braves in 5

Bring on the 1991 rematch. “And we’ll see you tomorrow night!!” ■

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