As the 162-game marathon that is the MLB regular season has given way to a week-long sprint to the finish line, it's lately begun to feel like we've gotten a head start on October baseball. Several teams are in the midst of potentially historic meltdowns; the Toronto Blue Jays and Detroit Tigers seemed to have their respective divisions sewn up only to cough them up with just days remaining, while the Houston Astros and New York Mets are trying to avoid missing out on the postseason entirely amid late-season swoons.
It feels like fortunes have been turning on a dime all week: One moment you're staring down a gut-punch loss, and the next you're escaping with an improbable win to keep hope alive. This is how baseball should be this time of year.
And yet, I can't help but feel like it's all ... just a little bit hollow. MLB's decision to expand its playoff format from eight teams to 10 to now 12 has certainly worked as intended, in the sense that it's kept more teams and fan bases engaged for longer than they otherwise would be. But here's the thing: Are we sure that all of those teams should still be engaged during the last week of the regular season?
One of the real virtues of the length of MLB's regular season is that it removes small-sample weirdness from the equation in a way that the NFL and even the NBA don't. We embrace the chaos of October with the knowledge that at least the teams who made it there had to prove they were the best of the best over the long haul.
Now, though, the calculus has changed. The simple fact is that it really doesn't take all that much anymore to make the postseason; just ask the 2023 Diamondbacks, who won 84 games before getting hot and getting all the way to the World Series. And that's taken a little bit of the air out of what should be the most exciting time of the baseball year, while robbing of us potentially even more tension.
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NL Wild Card race is proof that MLB's playoff format has gone too far
Look no further than the race for the third and final Wild Card spot in the NL. The Mets have gone 35-52 since June 12 and lost eight in a row at one point earlier this month, yet they still enter play Thursday in pole position at 81-77. Their primary competition? A Cincinnati Reds team addicted to mediocrity (they're 30-29 since the All-Star break and just lost a series to the Pittsburgh Pirates this week) and an Arizona Diamondbacks squad that sold off several key contributors at the trade deadline. Heck, the St. Louis Cardinals, despite not being relevant for months now, weren't even eliminated from postseason contention until Wednesday; the Miami Marlins are still mathematically alive!
It's not the most compelling sprint to the finish, is what we're saying, and it's hard to argue that any of these teams is worthy of making it to October. And while the thrill of a playoff chase is exciting in the moment, if anything, this new format has robbed us of something even more compelling: the idea of the most expensive team in baseball, with some of the biggest stars in the sport on its roster, at risk of falling out of the postseason entirely because of a terrible September.
Mets, Tigers collapses would be much more meaningful without a third Wild Card spot
And really, that's how it should be! The idea that the Mets are still the favorites to hold on and make the playoffs despite how bad they've been recently is an indictment of what Rob Manfred and Co. have made of the postseason — and the situation is similar in the American League.
The Detroit Tigers are in the midst of what might be the single most dramatic divisional collapse in the history of the sport (or at least in the history of the Divisional Era). It seemed unthinkable that the Tigers wouldn't coast to an AL Central crown, and yet the Cleveland Guardians now sit one game up with the head-to-head tiebreaker in hand after two straight wins on Tuesday and Wednesday.
But despite all that, Detroit entered play on Thursday ... still more or less fine, a game up on the similarly flailing Astros (with the benefit of the head-to-head tiebreaker) for the third and final AL Wild Card spot. Why are we rewarding this? Why should these teams deserve a soft landing? Shouldn't there be real stakes to taking on water like this in the season's final month, the baseball that the league wants to be most important?
The reality is that none of this will change so long as MLB remains (understandably) beholden to television revenue, revenue that increases greatly the more postseason games the league can cook up. I do think we've reached a point of diminishing returns here, though; more is not always better, at least not when it lets .500 teams into the dance.