Major League Baseball's Plan For Expanding The Postseason Is As Horrible An Idea As It Gets
Imagine a team picking its playoff opponent. Think about Brian Cashman and the Yankees deciding whether to face the Red Sox or avoid them in the first round of the postseason. All on live TV.
Well, it is probably coming soon to the major leagues. MLB is seriously weighing a move from five to seven playoff teams in each league beginning in 2022, The Post has learned.
In this concept, the team with the best record in each league would receive a bye to avoid the wild-card round and go directly to the Division Series. The two other division winners and the wild card with the next best record would each host all three games in a best-of-three wild-card round. So the bottom three wild cards would have no first-round home games.
The division winner with the second-best record in a league would then get the first pick of its opponent from those lower three wild cards, then the other division winner would pick, leaving the last two wild cards to play each other.
WHAT. THE. FUCK.
(Big T blogged this before and you can read that here)
In life there are good ideas and then there are bad ideas. Then there are ideas that should really be thought about before you suggest them out loud. Then there's 500 feet of crap. And finally there is this idea. Major League Baseball reworking the postseason entirely, adding more teams, and having top seeds pick their opponents is fucking insanity. This can't be serious right?
I think one of the best things about the MLB postseason is how hard it is to get in. It separates it from any other postseason and adds to the competitiveness. When they expanded to the wild card play-in game a few years ago that was a big deal. Now they want to add two more teams to each side to make it 7 in each league? Yeahhhhhh let's just make it little league where everyone makes the playoffs! How long do we want the postseason going for? Pitchers are going to flat out die on the mound if we do this. What's the point in a 162 game season if half the goddamn league makes the playoffs? A baseball team with 82 wins shouldn't be sniffing the postseason. Fuck it like 75 wins gets you in the hunt. I want to vomit.
I could live with the higher seeds picking their opponents. I don't necessarily love the idea, but if that was the only change I'm sure I'd get adjusted to it in due time. The idea of a live show where teams picked their opponents would be pretty nuts. Fine, sure whatever, but making it 7 teams is ludicrous. Am I an old man yelling at a cloud right now? I'm only 26 (my hair says otherwise I know) but this is insane right? I can't be alone here. No one was asking for the MLB postseason to change this radically. You want to shorten the regular season? Okay, but they'd never do it because they'd lose money.
Conspiracy theory time. Remember when all of the Hong Kong stuff was heating up with the Rockets GM Daryl Morey and LeBron? I mean the NBA was in utter chaos. What was "proposed" to shift the attention away? That mid-season tournament idea that never had a chance of working out. What did it do? It got NBA fans talking less about Hong Kong as a distraction. Well what is something that Major League Baseball needs people to stop talking about right now? The Houston Astros. Just when you think we're done talking about it, something else happens. Friday was AJ Hinch's interview. Then an hour after that the Wall Street Journal bombshell dropped. Today the Blue Jays pitcher announced that he's suing the Astros for ending his career. In a few days Astros players will report for Spring Training. There's no end in sight. Maybe this is their version of trying to get people to shut up?
Stop fucking with my sport Rob Manfred. You changed the D.L. to the I.L. You put in this shitty 3 batter rule with pitchers. You juiced the balls without telling anyone. You can't slide into second anymore to break up a double play. You're thinking about putting runners on second to start extra innings. You're blatantly lying in investigations. You're a goddamn mad man. STOP!