The expanded playoffs are great, actually

And it’s not because it helped the Royals

The Kansas City Royals have made it to the playoffs for the first time since 2015, doing so via a Wild Card spot like they did in 2014. That is wonderful news for Royals fans, who have descended on Google in droves to search things like “what is going on with the MLB postseason nowadays” because we didn’t actually know. Yes, I included “we” here, because I too had to look up said details a few weeks ago.

The lowdown is that there are three Wild Card teams now, all of whom must partake in a best-of-three Wild Card round alongside the worst of the three division winners. From then, the playoffs proceed apace with the best-of-five Divisional Series and the best-of-seven League Championship Series and World Series.

What is fascinating to me is that public perception of the third Wild Card team is rather low. I know that Twitter is absolutely not a neutral representative slice of humanity, but I see people complaining about the new Wild Card format all the time.

In part, this is because old-timers and baseball purists are grumpy about losing the original playoff format. Until 1969, the best American League team by record and the best National League team by record played in the World Series. Simple, but it meant that only two teams made the playoffs every year. The league expanded to 24 teams in 1969 and added the League Championship Series, doubling the amount of teams in the postseason from two to four.

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

At this point, it’s worth going over the main arguments against having 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 make the postseason now, diluting the talent pool.
• The Wild Card cheapens the regular season.

Most of the folks in the “I don’t like it” camp are the aforementioned baseball fans who liked how it used to be with much fewer teams. It was definitely a unique approach, but it was always one bound to end. When MLB last had only four playoff teams, the NFL playoffs featured 12 teams, and the NHL and NBA each featured 16 teams. I can’t help you there.

One thing that I don’t think most fans or pundits 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 had multiple tournaments a year, with point totals assigned to each. You’d also factor in overall record in non-tournament games.

Sports postseasons, rather, are designed to pit the league’s most skilled teams against each other in a high-pressure environment that is exciting, entertaining, and encourages playing at the highest skill level possible. As long as teams entering the playoffs hit a certain quality limit, expanding playoffs is great for everybody: it’s good for the fans, it’s good for the teams, and it’s good for the league.

The single most effective argument against having 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, having 12 playoff teams means that it is much more likely for a given team to make the playoffs, which incentivizes more teams to try to win. It further engages the fan bases, who now have reason to think that their team could make a run at the World Series with a merely good but not great squad. Besides, the regular season is still important—win your division with one of the two best records in the league, and you get a first-round bye.

I don’t think there are 16 playoff-worthy squads in Major League Baseball. But 12? There are certainly 12. The best teams have the best chance anyway, so let’s celebrate the new format for what it can do and root for our team that is making use of it.