On Baseball’s Postseason

This is October! There should be playoff baseball on television every day!

Instead, thanks to the quick exits of teams in the first round of the playoffs, we have a four day layover until the championship series begin.

And it’s been pointed out that if the two championship series go the minimum four games each, it will be eight days until the start of the World Series.

This, frankly, is stupid.

If baseball is unwilling — or rather, if television is unwilling — to move the championship series ahead, to cut down on the number of off-days between series, then perhaps it’s time to institute a system that’s more predictable.

My solution?

Scrap the Division and Championship Series entirely.

Take the division winners. And the Wild Card, if there’s not a tie atop the division standings. Each team plays a three game series against its three opponents. The home team in each series is whoever has the best record in the regular season — unless it’s the Wild Card team, in which case the series is played away for the WC team. Then, at the end of these nine games, the teams at the top of the National and American League championship tables advance to the World Series, and they play a traditional best-of-seven series.

Television gets something more predictable and easier to schedule. Baseball gets more post-season games this way. Fans get more excitement, as no team in the post-season is really ever that far out of contention. This injects drama back into October, something that has been sorely lacking this year.

I’ll be honest. I was pulling for the Twins and the Rockies to pull off improbable comebacks; I wanted the executives at TBS and FOX to be pulling out their hair at the prospect of having small-market teams in the World Series. Alas, it wasn’t to be.

So now I’m pulling for Dodgers/Angels. Just because there’s never been an all-Los Angeles World Series. 🙂

Anyway, there it is. My solution to a baseball problem that, perhaps, some people don’t even see as a problem.