The Problem: Good Teams Are Still Getting a Raw Deal<\/p>\n
Baseball is into Year 4 of its 12-team playoff era, and the way that teams are seeded for October still isn’t 100-percent intuitive.<\/p>\n
Take the New York Yankees, who entered the playoffs as the No. 4 seed on the American League side even though they tied for the AL’s best record during the regular season. In effect, the valuation of their 94-win season was overruled by their 5-8 performance in 13 games against the Toronto Blue Jays.<\/p>\n
Mind you, the Blue Jays have a fair gripe in their own right. <\/p>\n
Winning the AL’s No. 1 seed got them a first-round bye and home-field advantage, but they still had to face the Yankees again in the Division Series. That they won is obviously the good news for them, but it’s not ideal for MLB that their toughest hypothetical matchup occurred before the Championship Series.<\/p>\n
The Solution: How About a Re-Seed After the 1st Round?<\/p>\n
There’s an argument that in a perfect world, the six best teams in each league would be seeded as such without any complicating factors such as, say, division titles.<\/p>\n
Granted, this isn’t so much an ironclad idea as a taste test. Doing it that way would appropriately reward teams for grinding through the 162-game season, but it would also cheapen division races. If MLB does that, “What’s the point of divisions?” would become a fair question with no good answers.<\/p>\n
At the least, though, MLB needs to consider a re-seed after the Wild Card round so that the high seeds face the lowest remaining seeds. For 2025, this would have meant the Blue Jays (No. 1) facing the Detroit Tigers (No. 6) instead of the Yankees (No. 4), who would have faced the Seattle Mariners (No. 2).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Problem: Good Teams Are Still Getting a Raw Deal Baseball is into Year 4 of its 12-team…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":234142,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[363,99],"class_list":["post-234141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234141\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/234142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}