Actually, the expanded playoffs are great

The Kansas City Royals made the playoffs for the first time since 2015, and did so via a Wild Card berth, as they did in 2014. This is wonderful news for Royals fans who have been flocking to Google searching for things like “ “What’s going on with the MLB postseason these days?” because we actually didn’t know. Yes, I included “we” here because I too had to look up the details mentioned a few weeks ago.

The fact is that there are now three Wild Card teams, all of which must compete in a best-of-three Wild Card round with the worst of the three division winners. From there, the playoffs move quickly with the best-of-five Divisional Series and the best-of-seven League Championship Series and World Series.

What fascinates me is that public perception of the third wild card team is rather low. I know Twitter is absolutely not a neutral representative portion of humanity, but I see people complaining about the new wildcard format all the time.

That’s partly because old-timers and baseball purists are upset about losing the original playoff format. By 1969, the best American League team of all time and the best National League team of all time played in the World Series. Simple enough, but it meant only two teams made the playoffs each year. The league expanded to 24 teams in 1969 and added the League Championship Series, doubling the number of teams in the postseason from two to four.

It wasn’t until 1994 that the Wild Card round was introduced and the number of teams doubled again from four to eight. The second wild card and the infamous one-game wild card bonanza were introduced in 2012, bringing the total number of playoff teams to 10. The current 12-team playoffs were introduced in 2022.

At this point it’s worth going through the main arguments against so many teams and so many Wild Card teams in the playoffs. The most common arguments I hear are one of these:

• I don’t like it.
• Too many teams now make the postseason, diluting the talent pool.
• The Wild Card discounts the regular season.

Most people in the “don’t like” camp are the aforementioned baseball fans who liked the way things used to be, with a lot fewer teams. It was definitely a unique approach, but it always had an ending. When there were last only four playoff teams in the MLB, there were 12 teams in the NFL playoffs and 16 teams each in the NHL and NBA. I can’t help you with that.

One thing I think most fans and pundits don’t realize is that playoffs aren’t designed to definitively find the best team in a league. If that were the case, you would design a system that hosts multiple tournaments per year and assigns an overall score to each. They would also take into account the overall record in non-tournament games.

Rather, sports postseasons are designed to pit the league’s most experienced teams against one another in a high-pressure environment that is exciting, entertaining, and encourages performance at the highest possible level. As long as the teams that make the playoffs meet a certain threshold of quality, expanding the playoffs is great for everyone: it’s good for the fans, it’s good for the teams, and it’s good for the league.

The most powerful argument against 12 playoff teams is that the regular season is less important than it was when there were only four playoff teams (or even eight playoff teams). I just don’t think that’s the case. On the contrary, the presence of 12 playoff teams means that a given team is much more likely to make the playoffs, providing an incentive for more teams to try to win. It captivates the fan base even more because they now have reason to believe that their team could get to the World Series with a merely good-but-not-great roster. Plus, the regular season still matters – win your division with one of the two best records in the league and you’ll get a first-round bye.

I don’t think there are 16 playoff-eligible teams in Major League Baseball. But 12? There are definitely 12. The best teams have the best chances anyway, so let’s celebrate the new format for what it can do and keep our fingers crossed for our team that uses it.