One-Game Baseball Playoffs Are Sheer Lunacy

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

Monday will be unlike any day in Major League Baseball history. For the first time ever, baseball will see two one-game playoffs to determine a division winner. The Milwaukee Brewers visit the Chicago Cubs to contest the National League Central and the best record in the NL, while the Colorado Rockies head to Los Angeles to face the Dodgers for the NL West crown. It’s only the 15th and 16th times in baseball history a division tiebreaker game will be played, and the first time ever it happened twice in the same season.

It will be a wild day of one-off playoff baseball. Two teams will move on to have home-field advantage in the next round of the playoffs beginning Thursday. The two losers will face off in the NL Wildcard Game Tuesday night, where the loser will be eliminated from the playoffs completely.

It will be two days unlike any in National League history, and it’s sure to be scintillating baseball.

There’s just one problem: it’s also complete 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 7-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 1-game playoff, but that’s up against a 16-game regular season. One game is still 6.3% of the season’s length.
• A 7-game baseball series measures just 4.3% of a 162-game season. The Divisional Round is even shorter at just 3.1%, and the 1-game Wildcard is a measly 0.6% of the season.

It gets worse. Baseball playoff teams are very close by record. The Cubs, Brewers, Dodgers, Rockies, and Atlanta Braves all finished with between 90 and 95 wins. They each won between 55.6 and 58.6% 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 7-game baseball playoff series still end up in a very coin-flippy set of results. In the modern era, 98 teams have won 100 or more games in a season, around one a year. Only 36 of those teams went on to win the World Series. These are the top 100 teams in modern baseball history, and barely a third of them won the championship! That’s bad.

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 5-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 3. It’s running an entire marathon to a tie, then breaking the tie with an 854-foot race. That’s not even once 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 jaunt around a track to determine the entire playoff setup. It’s madness.

But wait! What about home field advantage?

The Cubs and Dodgers won the respective season series, so they’ll have home field for the divisional tiebreakers. 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 base. 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.

The Cubs have the best record in the National League and own the season tiebreaker over the Brewers. Common sense would suggest they are the best team in the NL and should have home-field advantage in the playoffs. Instead, there’s only a 54% chance they’ll have home field. There’s a 26% chance they’ll make the playoffs as the wildcard team, hitting the road for every series, and about a 20% chance they won’t make the real playoff bracket at all.

A 1-in-5 chance the best team in the NL won’t even make the playoff bracket!

Maybe the Brewers are the best team in the NL. They tied for the best record, after all. But there’s a 54% chance they’ll play every playoff series on the road or be eliminated before they even get to the real bracket. Heck, advanced stats would suggest the Dodgers are the best team in the National League, with their dominant run differential. The Dodgers have a 26% chance of being eliminated before the real playoff series even begin. Fantastic.

Meanwhile, one team has the fewest wins of any of the five. That’s the Atlanta Braves, at 90–72. They have the worst record of all ten playoff teams, but they’ll spend the day at home watching, waiting, and resting while these teams wear out pitchers and bullpens before the real battles even begin.

The Braves have nothing to do until Thursday. Compare that to the Rockies, who finished with a better record. They flew from Colorado to L.A. to face the Dodgers today. If they lose, they’ll fly to Chicagoland tonight to face the Brewers or Cubs tomorrow. Win that and it’s one more Wednesday flight along the shores of Lake Michigan as the real playoffs start on Thursday.

How is that fair for any of these teams?

You know what’s really interesting? It’s interesting how readily everyone accepts that Chicago and Los Angeles should host these one-game divisional playoffs. Those teams won the season series, after all. Chicago beat the Brewers 7 of 8 times in April and went on to win the season series 11-to-8. The Dodgers did even better, beating the Rockies 12-to-7 head to head.

So why isn’t that just the tiebreaker? The Cubs played at a 94-win pace against the Brewers this season. L.A. played a 102-win pace against Colorado. Is there any question which of these teams are the more deserving division champs?

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

The Cubs and Brewers each won four more games than any other team in the National League. Now the absolute best case outcome is that those teams play each other in the Divisional Round, eliminating one of them before the NLCS. Shouldn’t Chicago and Milwaukee be the 1- and 2-seeds? How much more fun would a Cubs-Brewers playoff game be if the teams could go all out, then rest until Thursday? The winner still gets home field advantage, so it still matters.

The Dodgers and Rockies play for the 3-seed. The loser has to play in the Wildcard Game, and there they’ll face the Atlanta Braves — you know, the worst team in 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 extra games just to get into the real playoffs.

Follow Brandon on Medium or @wheatonbrando for more sports, television, humor, and culture. Visit the rest of Brandon’s writing archives here.