This baseball postseason is testimony to the 162-game regular season, by far the longest among professional sports, having been rendered somewhat inconsequential.
All you season ticketholders take note.
Consider that the National League Championship Series was contested by Philadelphia and San Diego, two teams who slipped into the wild-card picture late, with a combined record just 28 games over .500.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Dodgers, whose regular-season dominance produced a final record of 111-51, 60 games over .500, sat and watched.
None of the NL division champs from the regular season made the NLCS. The New York Mets, a 101-win wild-card team, also fell into the no-show category.
Baseball used to be the purest sport in terms of its postseason. A team won the National or American league title in the regular season and advanced to the World Series.
There were no do-overs for the also-rans.
Expansion in both leagues has produced breakdowns into divisions and therefore division champions. Bad enough, but, of late, increased wild-card fields of teams who couldn’t even win a division now play on past the season’s end.
Admittedly, the postseason ran truer to form in the American League, where the Houston Astros, with the best regular-season record in their league, ended up meeting and defeating the New York Yankees — owners of the second-best AL record — in the ALCS.
That doesn’t take away from the wacky NL playoffs and their message.
Baseball’s main problem with wildly expanded playoff fields is that one position – pitching – can dominate a short series without a lot of depth beyond the top three starters and top two relievers.
Other sports are not as dominated by one aspect of the game.
As for huge playoff fields, yes, hockey floods the Stanley Cup playoffs with half the NHL franchises. But it all is contested in best-of-7 series, giving the superior team ample opportunity to overcome an off game or two.
When you are playing best-of-3, or best-of-5 series, as baseball does in its early postseason rounds, the chance for the upset increases substantially.
The early expectation is that form will hold in the World Series, with Houston favored over Philadelphia, the last team to qualify for the postseason.
That doesn’t change the fact that the baseball postseason is a flawed production. Either limit the number of teams making the postseason, or lengthen the series duration in early rounds, to restore some relevance to regular-season results.
Sam Ross Jr's site 