A Better Idea Than Playoffs, With Application To MLB
Complaint: finals are good but playoffs are the worst
Playoffs are terrible, and by now everyone understands why:
- Clean records strip all meaning from the long regular season.
- Small sample size makes middling teams champions by chance.
- Short futures favor gameplay quite unlike regular-season styles.
For all that, there’s one key thing they deliver to fans:
- Regular season titles rarely come down to the last game.
All we want is a meaningful regular season and a climactic final.
Here’s a blue-skies concept for how to get them both together.
Proposal: eliminate teams throughout the season instead
In (US) leagues, regular season games qualify teams for playoffs.
What if, instead, they qualified teams for more regular season games?
- Every game played would count in the standings all year.
- Teams would keep playing the same kind of games all year.
- But over time, fewer teams would remain eligible for the title.
This already has analogues in individual sports – in particular, golf.
- Only golfers making the cut after round 2 play rounds 3 and 4.
- But players’ scores from all four rounds add up for the trophy.
By doing the same thing with a team sport’s standings, recursively:
- the arbitrary character of playoffs can be avoided; while
- the satisfaction of a proper final can be retained.
Definitions: series, schedules, and seasons
Here’s a full definition of the season format described above.
Series
A series is a set of up to \(N\) games between two teams.
Any previous record a team has counts toward winning the series.
- Two tied teams would each have to win 4 out of 7, say.
- But a team initially behind by one game would have to win five.
Schedule
Between two teams, a schedule is just a series.
Between more teams, a schedule consists of two parts:
- A phase where each team faces each other twice (home & away);
- Another schedule among teams in each half of the standings.
That is, after the teams have played a double round robin:
- The top half of teams play another double round robin.
- The other half do likewise, but are ineligible the title.
- The process recurs until just two teams remain eligible.
- At that point, the top two teams play a concluding series.
Season
A season is an (annual) schedule among all teams in the league.
Every game played during the season counts in the standings all year.
- This is fair because schedules are balanced.
All teams still eligible have played the same opponents. - This is good because it retains information.
Achievements at the start matter all the way till the end.
Worked example: a 16-team baseball league
What would this look like in production?
For a simple example, imagine an NL or AL grown by one team to 16.
- Phase 1: 90 games (3 home, 3 away against 15 opponents)
- (All-Star break)
- Phase 2: 42 games (3 home, 3 away against 7 opponents)
- Phase 3: 18 games (3 home, 3 away against 3 opponents)
- Phase 4: League Championship Series (up to 7 games)
After the progressive 150-game regular season:
- No wild card or division series would be needed (or desired).
- There’d still be a final unless some team led by eight games.
- A World Series between the pennant winners would follow.
- Each pennant winner would be there for what they did all season.
Implications, applications, complications
Dimmer prospects for other sports
This idea is harder to picture in other major leagues at current sizes.
- A 32-team version would go 112 fixtures plus finals.
- That’s longer than an NHL or NBA season and playoffs together.
- The math is obviously even further from realistic for the NFL.
So MLB with its two distinct, smaller leagues makes a better example.
Leagues have their current unfair features for a reason
This plan would simplify away features that leagues make money on.
- Division rivalries (are assumed to) put butts in seats.
- Unbalanced schedules mean fewer travel miles, which are costly.
- Interleague play appears gone with the balanced schedule.
- Tickets can’t be sold in March for games scheduled in August.
All the same, there’s a simple reason that money shouldn’t be lost.
- Games that matter (do) put butts in seats.
- Under this plan, every regular-season game matters.
- So this plan makes regular-season games in general more valuable.
Besides, any league using this plan could choose how fully to do so.
- Adding a few interleague games, say, might not be too unfair.
Interaction with other league restructuing ideas
Future posts will touch on other competition redesign concepts.
- These would complement the concept discussed here and vice versa.
- But each stands alone just fine and could be adopted by itself.