Just less than three weeks ago, news leaked that MLB was considering a new expanded playoff format that would blow up the bracket from 10 to 14 teams and add a reality-style selection show to the mix.
Look, I'm not a hot take guy. One of the reasons I am conservative about what I do on social media is that my ability to channel my emotions in a way that prevents them from forcing my fingertips to create regretful keystrokes is limited. I have to consider empirical information, historical context and many other things before I can arrive at something like a level-headed response. You will never see me on one of those talking-head debate shows because I would quite likely come across as a maniac.
Of course, things happen and you have to be ready to respond to them. If you stay close to your subject -- baseball, in this case -- there are rarely complete surprises. You hear whispers, you recognize trends, you encounter enough recurring situations that when news breaks, you pretty much know how to process it if you're prepared.
Not in this case. That playoff proposal came out of the ether, materializing like Q on the bridge of the Enterprise, and it was just about as welcome. Here was a solution in search of a problem. And so I ranted.
We've since had some time to process it. There has been much written about the idea, which at this point falls short of an actual proposal. There has been some interesting analysis done. Players have responded, executives have chimed in, the MLBPA has acknowledged it in an opaque way. And you know what? I still hate it.
Let's get into this by first tracing back a few years ... let's say five ... and try to envision just how this format might play out in a typical season.
2015
Picking this up on Aug. 1, there were 10 teams that either held playoff position under the existing format or were within five games of a slot. For our purposes, any team within five games of a playoff slot will be called a "contender." With the proposed format, which would have seven playoff teams in the AL instead of five, the number of contenders would have been 12. No team would have been more than seven games out of a playoff spot.
By Sept. 1, the existing format still yielded nine teams that were in playoff position or within five games. The new format would put that number at 14 of the 15 teams in the league. The 61-71 Red Sox were just five games back of the Rays and Angels, who were tied for the No. 7 spot at 66-66. What a race!
At season's end, we had our five real-life playoff teams plus four other contenders who fell short. With the new format, we'd have had seven playoff teams plus four contenders.
The change in format would have given us:
• Two new playoff teams (85-77 Angels, 83-79 Twins)
• Two additional contenders (80-82 Rays, 78-84 Red Sox)
2016
The Aug. 1 standings gave us seven teams in the hunt, the five teams holding the existing playoff spots, plus two contenders. All seven of those teams would have been in playoff position under the proposal, plus three more contenders.
By Sept. 1, our list of contenders in the current system would have grown to 10. The new system would have yielded 10 contenders as well.
At season's end, the existing format gave us nine contenders ... nine teams that hung within five games 'til the end. The new format would have given us one more contender.
The change in format would have given us:
• Two new playoff teams (86-76 Mariners, 84-78 Yankees)
• One additional contender: (81-81 Royals)
2017
On Aug. 1, we had the runaway Astros already with an apparent hammerlock on the top spot in the AL, 11 games ahead of the field. With the current system, we had 10 contenders overall. The new system would have given us 12 contenders.
By Sept. 1, the Houston hammerlock came loose -- Cleveland had closed from 11 games back of the overall top slot to 2½. (That was the year the Indians reeled off 22 wins in a row.) Our list of contenders stood at 11. The new system would have given us 11 contenders as well.
At the end of the season, the Indians had passed Houston for the No. 1 seed. If we rewarded only the best teams in each league, as was the case until 1968, it would have been an epic pennant race. Anyway, we ended up with eight contenders. The new system would have given us 13. That's right -- the new playoff proposal would have kept 13 of the 15 AL teams alive in the playoff chase into the final week of the season.
The change in format would have given us:
• Two new playoff teams (the Rays, Angels and Royals all were 80-82, so two of those three)
• Six additional contenders: (the 80-82 team that missed out, 78-84 Rangers, 78-84 Mariners, 76-86 Blue Jays, 75-87 Orioles, 75-87 Athletics)
This, in my opinion, is a disastrous scenario.
2018
Aug. 1: Just six contenders under the current system. The new format would have given us eight.
Sept. 1: The existing format is at six contenders. The new format would have given us seven -- the seven teams in playoff position, and no others within five games.
When the season was over, we really had just five contenders. The AL Central champion Indians were weak, and the two wild-card entrants (New York and Oakland) both won at least 97 games. Under the new format, we'd add Tampa Bay and Seattle to the mix, with no additional contenders. Even with all those playoff slots, there wouldn't have been much September drama because the seven clubs would have been largely set.
The change in format would have given us:
• Two new playoff teams (90-72 Rays, 89-73 Mariners)
• Additional contenders: None
2019
Aug. 1: Six contenders. New format would have been eight.
Sept. 1: Seven contenders. New format also would have been seven.
At season's end, six contenders. New format would have been seven. Again, for most of September, the seven playoff teams would have been more or less set. There would have been some battles for seeding, but that's all.
The change in format would have given us:
• Two new playoff teams (93-69 Indians, 84-78 Red Sox)
• Additional contenders: None
All told, the 10 additional playoff teams posted an average record of about 85-77. That's not terrible, to be sure, but there were some terrible instances, including the two 80-82 teams getting spots in 2017.
Some defenses of the proposal have mentioned that since 2012, when the second wild card was added, "only" four teams with losing records would have gone in under the proposed format, as if such a thing happening even once weren't an abomination. (And, yes, I remember that in 1994, the Rangers likely would have won the AL West with a sub-.500 mark if not for the strike that wiped out the end of the season.) Also, consider this: The average record of these new "contenders" identified above -- the ones that hung on into the final week but didn't land in the top seven -- was just 78-84. That's a contender? Under the new format, the answer is yes.
If baseball were to expand its playoff footprint, I'd suggest making .500 a minimum percentage for inclusion. If you have only six teams to hit that mark in the season, then you have only six playoff teams. But of course, that causes problems with the broadcast partners. What's troubling is not that 85-77 is terrible. There have been worse teams in the postseason, including the 83-78 Cardinals in 2006, who went on to win the World Series. It's just mediocre.
Mediocrity in baseball is a problem. It's a mortal enemy. It's not interesting. Not in this sport, where small differences between players and teams are only borne out after a large sample of games. We would be rewarding such mediocrity by making it the benchmark for playoff inclusion rather than an odd annoyance. We would be sucking the life out of the regular season.
There are tangible problems with this structure. First, as laid out nicely by FanGraphs' Ben Clemens, is when the postseason barrier is so low, it will likely quell competitive behavior, not encourage it. Also, because a typical season would see so many teams still alive in a tepid playoff jog, there would be fewer sellers at the trade deadline, undermining that dramatic time of the year.
My guess is that deals that would get done would be made more for financial reasons than for competitive ones. You'd have the Yankees and Dodgers maintaining powerhouse rosters to secure the top overall seeds, then a lot of teams jockeying for spots two through seven, with not that much difference among them.
Allowing nearly half a league into the playoffs cheapens the regular season to a damaging degree. The races you pick up -- those among the mediocre -- would outnumber the good races we still have and would lose. Maybe we'd get the occasional great race for a No. 1 seed, but even then, there would be no real loser in the race. Divisions would lose all meaning. We might as well scrap them and have two 15-team leagues because if you're not in the race for the top seed, then you're not really in a division race. You're battling for a seed.
The races you pick up in the new format would be lesser than ones we get now because the teams would be worse. There might be a mild uptick in interest for a team that hasn't sniffed the postseason in a while, but interest would decline late in the season for teams that are actually good. I'm positive that's what would happen. Even under the current format, studies have struggled to show that wild-card races are a boon to overall league attendance. What you gain in one place, you give up somewhere else. And what you give up is more alluring than what you gain.
The one point that playoff expansion defenders have made that I agree with is that it would lessen the incentive to go into a tear-down-to-the-studs rebuild. Why would you? When .500 keeps you in contention, why conduct a fire sale? A veteran roster and a little luck could make you a wild-card team. If teams are no longer compelled to build into something special, why would they need to bottom out? Staying around the middle works just fine.
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The thing is, it's questionable whether tanking is really that much of a problem in the first place. It has been extreme the past couple of years, and we shouldn't ignore the reality of trying to market a team that has clearly advertised it's not trying. But the number of teams that went that route around the same time a few years ago was unusual. These past couple of years could well just be a blip on the competitive radar. The strategy is not going to work out for some of those teams, discouraging others from following the path. One or two tanking teams at a time is not really a big problem.
But if we need one, I do have an anti-tanking notion that I've come to fancy. I doubt it's anything that hasn't been floated elsewhere, and this is an incomplete proposal that would have to be idiot-proofed. But here's what I would do:
Sometime during the month leading up to the trade deadline, teams would have to declare themselves: Are they going for the postseason or are they building for next year? You'd have to have some sort of standard for which teams would be eligible to declare themselves out of the race.
The teams that are declared rebuilders would then enter into a competition for first-round draft position, based on their record after the deadline. The better your post-deadline record, the better your first-round draft slot. Fans of also-rans would never be put in the awkward spot of rooting against their own team because they want that coveted No. 1 pick. They'd be rooting harder than ever for them to win over the last couple of months.
Teams that don't declare themselves as rebuilders would not be able to draft ahead of teams that are in the pool. If you declare but make the playoffs -- oops! -- you drop to the bottom of the first round, but at least you've made the playoffs. Still, for teams on the fringe of contention, you have a tough choice to make. If you don't declare yourself out of the race, then you can't enter the derby for a premium draft pick. But you have to win to get that pick and you might end up squeezing into the playoffs. The calculus would be complicated.
There are undoubtedly a number of possible scenarios that would have to be considered in order to prevent teams from gaming the system, but this is the foundation of the idea. Teams would still want to move veterans for packages of prospects. They'd still want to clear payroll for flexibility down the line. But they wouldn't want to cut too close to the quick because they'd have to maintain a strong enough roster to win games down the stretch.
This is a lot more elegant than the idea of cheapening what it means to be a playoff team in baseball. It kills me to hear statements about how many teams get into the postseason in other sports. Those sports aren't baseball! Home-field advantage and byes are a big deal in the NFL playoffs. Teams play up to their seed in the NBA playoffs far more often than what would happen in baseball. The comparisons are not valid.
What makes baseball special is that six-month slog toward October. Instead of increasing the crapshoot of the postseason to an absurd level, MLB needs to focus on enhancing what makes it special -- the marathon, not the sprint. Baseball's proposal is really about artificially creating drama by sacrificing the building wonder of a monthslong push for excellence. The focus late in the season would turn to middling teams jockeying for participation trophies. The only reason to do it is to monetize those newly created high-stakes games. Which is why it'll probably happen.
I am for innovation as baseball seeks to win over new fans and extend its reach. At the same time, baseball needs to make sure it's not alienating its core fan base before the product becomes so unrecognizable that those who really care about it stop caring. After all, what appeal is there in a product that doesn't appear to believe in itself?
Three little things
1. This winter, MLB Network produced a documentary about the Whitey Herzog era St. Louis Cardinals, teams best remembered for often resembling a track team more than a baseball club. St. Louis averaged 230 stolen bases from 1982 through 1989, Herzog's eight full seasons as the Redbirds' skipper. The Cardinals' 1,840 steals during that span were 538 more than any other team in a base-stealing era. It also was the most steals a team has ever had over an eight-year span, even including clubs during the wild dead ball era.
Last season, the number of steals per game in the majors dipped to 0.47, the lowest figure since 1971. The average number of caught stealings per game was down to 0.17, the lowest figure of the modern era. The rate of caught stealings (26.7%, per Baseball-Reference.com) was the third lowest in history, behind 2007 (25.6%) and 2012 (26.0%).
At first blush, these trends would seem to be at odds. If teams are throwing out a lower percentage of runners than ever, then shouldn't teams be trying to steal more? Alas, no. At play are the factors that push down stolen base attempts in general. First, there is the higher home run rate, which makes the cost of losing a runner on the bases higher and makes teams averse to risk on the basepaths.
Second, there is the advance of analytics. Teams have more specific information than ever about catcher pop times and throwing speed, pitcher delivery times and runner sprint speeds. They can calibrate pretty accurately the probability of success for any prospective steal attempt. The math that tells us that steals don't yield a positive effect over the course of a season unless you're successful about 75% of the time has been around for a long time now. It was inevitable that the caught-stealing number would eventually approach 25%. During the Whiteyball era, the caught-stealing rate was around 32%.
A key factor in the development of the Royals/Cardinals playing style under Herzog was venue -- bigger parks and more field surfaces that played like the top of a billiard table. Those venues are long gone. Parks are smaller and even those with artificial turf use a far more sophisticated brand of the fake stuff, which plays more like natural grass. More players can go yard nowadays. Pretty much all of them, really. It's hard to become a regular in 2020 baseball if you can't hit a minimum of 10 to 15 homers, regardless of position.
As part of the rules experimentation collaboration MLB conducted with the independent Atlantic League last season, the latter circuit tried eliminating certain kinds of pickoff moves, requiring pitchers to step off the rubber for attempting to catch a napping runner. On Thursday, Baseball America reported that the rule would move into a large swath of affiliated ball this season, though neither MLB nor MiLB have confirmed that report as yet.
As was pointed out in the BA article, the avatar for the kind of move that is barred with this rule is former big leaguer Andy Pettitte who, according to Baseball-Reference.com, ranks third on the career list of pickoffs with 98, behind Steve Carlton (146) and Mark Buehrle (100). If you need to refresh your memory about what Pettitte's move looked like, here's a segment from MLB Network with the man himself explaining it to Harold Reynolds.
Obviously, this is a fairly intrusive way to increase the frequency of stolen base attempts. In the Atlantic League, that's what happened. According to BA, attempts jumped from 1.03 per game during the first half of the season to 1.69 after the rule was implemented. The caught-stealing rate fell from 25% to 19%. Surprisingly, another consequence of the rule change was that double plays fell off because baserunners were able to get bigger leads.
I'm uncertain about this intervention. I'm not against baseball forcing the issue when the game becomes unbalanced. I'd like to see more steals, and fewer homers but more hits in general. I think pretty much everyone except pitchers would like to see fewer strikeouts. If the game evolves in a fashion that is unhealthy to the core product, then it would be folly to sit back and just let it happen.
That said, if this change is widely implemented in 2020 in the minors, it'll bear watching. It seems to me that if the home run rate was corralled, the incentive structures within the game would shift. All-or-nothing approaches would be less valuable, in theory, and the ability to put the ball in play would be enhanced. That should curb the strikeout trend at least some, and the importance of taking an extra base would be heightened. That's the No. 1 issue I see when it comes to restoring balance in the game: Get a handle on what the ball is doing.
This approach seems like an artificial fix, one that inhibits a valuable skill for left-handed pitchers such as Pettitte. There might be more steals, but I'm not sure it makes the overall game more engaging. We'll see. I'm agnostic until I see it in action. Skeptical, but agnostic.
2. I spent a few hours making some calculations for what could serve as the underpinning for a feature later in the season. The feature wouldn't be about this exactly, but as a tangent to it, I got to wondering about overlapping stars through history, position players only. In other words, for stars whose careers unfolded at least partially at the same time as another star, who combined to produced the most value?
An example: Willie Mays played in the majors from 1951 to 1973. Carl Yastrzemski played just as long, from 1961 to 1983. But obviously there was an offset there of a full decade -- Mays was a 10-year vet by the time Yaz broke in. So their overlapping production ran only during the years in which they were both active, from 1961 to 1973. During those years, they combined to produce 163.1 bWAR. As it happens, that ranks 274th all time.
I couldn't produce these calculations for every possible hitter combo in history -- that's beyond my programming ability -- but I did narrow it down by running the numbers for the top 500 hitters by career runs created. It's possible there are some combinations that might have cracked the leaderboard that I missed, but it seems unlikely.
Here are the top five overlapping combos among hitters:
1. Babe Ruth & Roger Hornsby (309.4 overlapping bWAR, from 1915 to 1935)
2. Hank Aaron & Willie Mays (291.7, 1954 to 1973)
3. Ty Cobb & Tris Speaker (282.3, 1907 to 1928)
4. Cobb & Eddie Collins (274.9, 1906 to 1928)
5. Collins & Speaker (258.1, 1907 to 1928)
Incidentally, Cobb, Speaker and Collins all played together on the 1928 Philadelphia Athletics during what proved to be the final seasons for both Cobb and Speaker. OK, I'll give you No. 6, because it comprises two of my favorite all-time players and they are pretty popular in general:
6. Mays & Mickey Mantle (250.3, 1951 to 1968)
One more: Stan Musial and Ted Williams overlapped for 20 years (not seasons), from 1941, when Musial broke in, to 1960, when Williams retired. They combined for 230.7 bWAR during that time, ranking 17th. But as with all measurements of their careers, there are missing seasons because of military service to ponder. Williams lost a little less than five seasons -- from 1943 to 1945 and again from 1952 to 1953, when he played a combined 43 games. Musial missed the 1945 season.
Using what they did in the seasons before and after service as a guide, we can guess that Williams lost around 10.75 bWAR per season for his first stint, and would have been around 7.5 for each of the two seasons in the 1950s. Giving him credit for the partial seasons he did get in, we can guess that the Splinter lost about 45 bWAR. Musial lost about 8.7, bringing their combined loss to 53.7. Add that to their total of 230.7 overlapping bWAR, and you're at 284.4, which would rank third.
This is speculative. Williams and Musial could have produced more or less than these crude estimates. Still, while it's possible they could have caught Aaron and Mays for No. 2, it's unlikely they would have run down Ruth and Hornsby. Also, let's not forget Mays lost nearly two seasons to military service as well. He had not fully established his level of play by the time he went in, so it's more difficult to guess what he might have done. However, it's likely his partnership with Mantle would have pushed into the top five.
As for active combos, tune back in for that aforementioned feature later this season. But it shouldn't take you long to guess who tops the list.
3. Last week, I ran my latest Stock Watch piece. We'll do our next one sometime around Opening Day, when rosters are fixed. I make at least small tweaks to my depth charts every day to reflect transactions, injuries and other little newsy tidbits that convince me whether a player will play more or less than I figured. Then each Thursday, I run a fresh set of simulations because I like to keep a record of how teams' outlooks evolve. Most of the changes are too small to merit discussion. Most weeks, however, there is at least one major injury, free-agent signing or trade that has a noticeable effect on my projected standings. I plan to note those here in my weekly Friday installment.
Indeed, there was one major piece of news last week that impacted a team's outlook: the season-ending Tommy John surgery that Yankees pitcher Luis Severino underwent Thursday. That wasn't the only bad news New York received over the last week, with Giancarlo Stanton now likely to open the season on the disabled list. Also, while James Paxton seems to be coming along in his recovery from back trouble, it seems more certain he'll also be on the shelf to begin the campaign.
The latter two bits of intel weren't huge factors in the Yankees' outlook, but they did spur me to knock down my playing time projections for Stanton and Paxton a smidge. As for replacing Severino's innings, I spread those out among J.A. Happ, Jordan Montgomery and Jonathan Loaisiga for the time being.
What did the simulations say? Well, the good news for Yankees fans is the Bronx Bombers still own the No. 1 power rating in my system. The bad news is their margin for error got a lot smaller. New York's average win total in the simulations fell from 104.1 to 101.6, its probability of winning the AL East fell from 82.9% to 75.3%, and its chances to win the World Series fell from 23.8% to 19.7%.
Clearly, there are still plenty of reasons for New Yorkers to be amped about the Yankees this season. But the past week has shown that, as always, winning a championship means navigating a rocky road.