I could prove to you that the Tampa Bay Rays, New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox are the three best teams in the American League a number of ways; I could point you to Pythagorean or BaseRuns adjusted records, I could direct your attention to cumulative team WAR; I could pick any team success stat under the sun and show you that the Rays, Yankees and Red Sox lead the American League in it. But we don’t need to do any of that.
I can just point at the actual, real-life MLB standings and show that Boston, New York and Tampa are basically five, ten and fifteen games ahead of the field respectively. And yet only one of them will play in the American League Championship Series. One of them won’t even play in the Division Series, while whatever three-team combination of stupidity comes out of the AL West and AL Central is guaranteed an ALCS berth. It’s stupid.
Usually, I’m not one for these “we need to change the system because of this one annoying outcome” type takes, but this is a rare case when I think the system is definitionally broken. Divisions were not designed for the expanded Wild Card era, which is only four years old, and the dawn of widespread interleague play has reduced the number of division matchups so much the groupings now feel arbitrary. We are this close to a sub .500 team in the ALCS — something has to change. Thankfully, I’ve fixed everything in three steps.
Step 1: No sub .500 teams in the playoffs, period.
Hey, sports team over there, do you want to make the playoffs? Did you and everyone else play an entire regular season to find out who deserves to be in the playoffs? Great! How about you WIN HALF YOUR GAMES if you want a chance to compete for a championship?
But how will this work, you ask? Simple: ban every sub .500 team from the playoffs, then readjust as needed. Extra byes? Sure! Configure rounds differently? Fine. This will be a rare occurrence, so it can be some kind of emergency rule trigger rather than a permanent change. This isn’t even going to be necessary this year (in all likelihood) so we’re just adding this to make sure no clowns ever sneak in. I hate clowns.
Step 2: Keep division winner auto-bids, but re-seed ALL teams
This is the money maker and is almost as common sense as it gets. Take this year’s standings. Instead of having the AL Central and AL West winners get a bye and home field in the Wild Card, thus creating the stupid three-man tango we have this year, just have the Yankees get the other bye and the Red Sox home field in the Wild Card. In a world without that many divisional games, you shouldn’t get a special prize for being first among fools.
The only resistance to this fix will be those that want the division race to really mean something, but I’d argue an auto-bid will always matter, and most of the time the standings within the division will mean as much as they always do. It’s not like the Red Sox would stop trying to catch the Yankees is this system … they want to play the easier team! Right now, it would honestly be better for Boston if they tanked for the third slot, which sucks.
Step 3: Profit
I just wanted to write “Step 3: Profit,” I don’t know if this will actually make anyone money … but it won’t lose the league money which means they should and could absolutely do it. Reseeding is great; it’s intuitive, it makes the regular season matter more and every sport should do it. Divisions, meanwhile, are arbitrary and mean very little in this day and age. Let them matter, but don’t let them matter as much.
Add us as a preferred source on Google