How do the Major League Baseball Playoffs Work?

I went to a Mets game this year and took this photo. They did not make the playoffs.

The Major League Baseball playoffs are among the most confusing playoffs for me because they have the most variety of format of all of the major sports’ playoffs. The MLB playoffs consist of four rounds and three different formats. It’s also confusing to me because it’s the sport I follow the least but since it started yesterday I’ve done some reading, some watching, and some listening and I am ready to report back to you what I’ve learned and then comment on what makes sense about it and what doesn’t. Let’s travel backwards through the playoffs starting with the most famous and familiar element, the World Series.

The World Series

The World Series determines the championship of the MLB. It is a best of seven series where the first team to win four games wins the series. This format is the one the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League use throughout their playoffs. Instead of dividing the league into East and West as the NBA and NHL have done for years, baseball (like football) uses history to divide their league in two. The National League was formed in 1876 and the American League in 1901. Teams from the two leagues have been facing each other in the World Series since 1903.[1] The first two games are played at one team’s home stadium, the next three at the other’s, and the last two, if necessary, at the first team’s stadium. Instead of using regular season record to decide who gets four potential games at home and who three, since 2003, this advantage was granted to the team representing whichever league won in the mid-season all-star game, an otherwise meaningless exhibition.

The Championship Series

To make it to the World Series, a team has to make it through the semi-final round, confusingly called either the American or National League Championship Series, again for historic reasons. This series follows the same seven game format as the World Series. Another oddity of baseball that stems from its history as two separate leagues is that each league plays under slightly different rules. The biggest difference is that in the National League, pitchers are required to bat whereas in the American League teams have the option[2] to replace the pitcher in the batting order with a player who only has to hit, never field. That “position” is called the designated hitter. These rules have all sorts of tactical consequences which deserve their own post but which become even more interesting in the World Series when both teams must play by the home team’s rules.

The Divisional Series

The four teams that make it to the ALCS or the NLCS have won the previous round, the Divisional Series. The divisional series’ are the quarterfinals and consist of eight teams. The format is a five game series where the first team to win three games wins the series. Each League is made up of three five-team divisions. The team in each division with the best regular season record is a division winner and automatically gets a place in the divisional series. The other two teams that make it to this round are called wild-cards and until 2012 were the two teams, one from each league, with the highest win total among non-division winning teams.

The Wild Card Playoff

Since 2012 the two extra teams to make it into the Divisional series have been the winners of the Wild Card Playoff. The Wild Card Playoff (surprise, surprise) follows a third format. It is a single elimination game. One game, the winner of which advances to the next round of the playoffs. The four teams that make it to to the Wild Card Playoff, two from each league, are the teams with the highest and second highest win total in the regular season among non-division winning teams. In 2013, the Wild Card Playoff games were between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati in the National League and Tampa Bay and Cleveland in the American League.

What Makes Sense and What Doesn’t

There are elements of this complicated setup that make sense and some that don’t. Increasing the number of games in a series as the playoffs go on makes sense because the longer a series is, the more likely it is that the better[3] team will win, and it feels more important to get the championship right than it does the quarterfinals. Varying the length of the series’ also makes sense because it maximizes the number of teams involved while answering critics who say that the playoffs are too long to sustain interest. Maximizing the number of teams involved is great for fans who may wait years for their team to even make the playoffs and great for owners who might earn more money from one playoff game than a dozen regular season games.

What doesn’t make sense to me is the Wild Card Playoff. Reducing a series from seven games to five as a trade-off between getting it right and making it worth watching seems reasonable to me but going all the way down to one game sacrifices too much. Any one game between professional teams, especially ones that are good enough to make it to the playoffs, approaches a coin-toss. The coin may be weighted in one direction or another but at most it’s probably a 40-60 proposition. One game is simply not statistically significant enough to be a reliable indication of who is better. This is particularly unsatisfying in a sport that takes statistical significance so seriously that it plays 162 games in its regular season as opposed to 82 in professional hockey and basketball and 16 in football. On an emotional level, I can’t imagine following a team for 162 games over six months only to have it end with one bad game.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Believe it or not, the two leagues only merged as corporate entities in 2000!!
  2. Which they basically always take.
  3. It’s easy to twist yourself into knots about this one. If the worse team wins then aren’t they the better team? It can be an endless argument or an unspoken agreement.

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