The 2022 MLB post-season is set to become a lot longer thanks to one of the more far-reaching changes arising from the recent collective bargaining agreement. This year there will be 12 teams involved six from the American League & six from the National League.
This year’s postseason will comprise the six divisional winners together with the three teams with the next best records in each league. Not only that but the wild card round will now be a best of three rather than a win or go home scenario as of old. This is quite a seismic change, given that as recently as 2011 there were only two wild card teams. and propr to 1994 only the divisional winners competed.
Anyway the new “improved format” sees the third-best division winner play the team ranked sixth. The winner of that will go on to play the No 2 seed while the winner of the No 4 & 5 clash gets the unenviable task of playing the No1 seed. The Wild Card games will all be played as a three-game series’ hosted by the team with the best record.
This means there will be no more game 163s as in future any ties will be decided statistically rather than in a playoff game. This structure also means there will be no reseeding meaning if seed 6 wins they will still avoid facing No 1.
Confused? Well, perhaps an example of how last season would have looked will help.
2021 Playoffs in Retrospect
This is how last year’s seedings would have looked:
American League
1 Tampa Bay Rays
2 Houston Astros
3 Chicago White Sox
4 Boston Red Sox
5 New York Yankees
6 Toronto Blue Jays
Wild Card Games
This gives Chicago v Toronto & Boston v New York. So four AL teams in and a three-game series between the Sox & Yankees rather than the single-game shoot-out. Probably not a whole lot of difference, unlike the National League…
National League
1 San Francisco Giants
2 Milwaukee Brewers
3 Atlanta Braves
4 LA Dodgers
5 St. Louis Cardinals
6 Cincinnati Reds
Here the eventual World Series winners Atlanta would have had to get past the Reds in a best of three. Would they have? Probably but it would have been an extra hurdle to cross.
Would the Braves be proudly displaying the above under the new format?
So why did this happen?
Money of course! Playoff games tend to sell out and now instead of a solitary Wild Card game in each league, there will be at least four and possibly six.
That’s not only a lot of tickets & Hot Dogs but a chunk of extra TV Money too. The prospects of up to 12 extra prime-time games will get the advertisers salivating and for the neutral fan, it’s a bit more exciting too.
Check out our probably too early predictions for the American & National Leagues.
