New baseball commissioner Rob Manfred already has shown he’s open to making some big changes in the game. He told ESPN in January that he’s pushing for a pitch clock to speed up the pace of increasingly slow games and considering rules outlawing overshifts by defenses as a means of opening up offense.
As much as the general idea of encouraging pitchers to hustle appeals to me, I don’t like the concept of an imposing red clock looming over my baseball. If I want that type of suspense, I’ll turn on Supermarket Sweep re-runs.
And I’d like to see the shifts die through some natural evolution of the game, namely by hitters wising up and choosing not to stubbornly hit right into them.
But while we’re throwing grand ideas around, here’s mine: Lengthen some postseason series.
One of the most enduring baseball quotes of this century was uttered by Oakland A’s general manager and sabermetric revolutionary Billy Beane in Michael Lewis’ 2003 book “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.”
“My (expletive) doesn’t work in the play-offs. My job is to get us to the play-offs. What happens after that is (expletiving) luck,” he said.
This is because the advanced statistics he champions are best used to predict outcomes over large sample sizes, such as a 162-game season. Many are basically useless in the context of a short series, when an excellent team can go into a brief funk and be eliminated quickly. After all, even the best teams lose 60-plus times per year.
The numbers bear how random the postseason can be. In four of the past five years, at least one league championship series has included a wild-card team that ousted a division winner to advance. This past season, two wild-card teams advanced to the World Series, with the San Francisco Giants beating the Kansas City Royals in seven games.
That’s fine if you like drama and underdogs, but too many postseason Cinderellas can undermine the credibility of the grueling six-month regular season. This is especially true of the divisional round, when a division winner can be swept out by a team it’s been better than all year in as few as three games.
So tweaking the current format a little bit to give division winners more of an advantage is something I’d like to see.
I’d start by making the wild-card round a best-of-three series. This would force wild-card teams to use more pitchers before the divisional round begins while largely preserving the do-or-die nature that’s made its creation such a popular expansion of the postseason.
I’d also make the divisional round a best of seven, because if you’re a baseball team that posted a better record than an opponent over 162 games, you should get at least as many mulligans as eighth seeds do in NBA and NHL playoff formats.
Those two changes would provide a nice edge for division winners. They’d add inventory from which MLB could rake in more TV money, and they wouldn’t be such a significant expansion that it’d be too much for the crowded October sports calendar to handle.
On top of that, the wild-card expansion especially would end the silly debates about how to set up pitching rotations for the postseason in the heat of a pennant race.
We had one here in Pittsburgh last season, when many advocated the Pirates hold back Francisco Liriano from the final series against the Reds as the team clung to faint division hopes. Many believed the Bucs would be better off effectively ceding the National League Central race and deploying him in the wild-card game against the Giants.
Adding even more incentive to winning the division would put the focus back on the final days of pennant races and make them more exciting in and of themselves.
I’d also like to see the league championship series and World Series become best of nines with limited off days.
This would force teams to use a little more of the pitching depth that helped get them to the postseason in the first place by discouraging the slimmed-down three-man rotations we usually see in the playoffs, on top of ramping up the sample size a little bit.
Granted, best of nines would probably be tricky. Implementing them along with the aforementioned changes would add more than a week to the schedule, which already runs deep into October. Playing into November would be perilous at best for northern teams, so sticking to a longer wild-card round and expanding the division series seems like a more manageable course.
Generally, though, baseball is better for any changes that make postseason rounds less of a statistical coin flip and more reflective of the regular season they follow.
Hopefully, Rob Manfred considers that as much as his menacing countdowns to pitcher doom.
Adam Bittner writes sports commentary for The Pittsburgh Press, our afternoon electronic edition. He can be reached at abittner@post-gazette.com.
First Published: February 12, 2015, 9:03 p.m.