How To Fix the Baseball Playoffs And Increase Ratings

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Why? Because one is a “typical” policy that cuts corners on coverage to keep your price and deductible low while the other optimizes coverages and makes tradeoffs that greatly reduces your tail risk. Which would you rather have? Most people would likely prefer the second policy but instead end up with something like the first.

Why Change the MLB Playoffs?

With the NCAA basketball tournament ending and baseball about to begin, I thought it would be an opportune time to unveil another one of my crazy ideas that’s actually a lot more sensible than it might seem at first blush.

Why do the NFL playoffs garner such high ratings? Because every game is an elimination game. Why does the NCAA Tourney get so much attention? Because every game is an elimination game and there are lots of upsets (even if, in the end, most of the time one of the top teams wins in the end).

Why do MLB playoff games get beaten in the ratings by Thursday Night Football games between the Jets and the Lions? Because they’re not relevant unless you live in one of the cities playing. They are five or seven game series, so even if you miss a game, well, you can always watch the next one. The stakes aren’t significant enough.

MLB’s plan to add yet more teams to the playoffs doesn’t change any of that. Sure, it will make money because it will do better in the ratings than some 1990s re-run but it doesn’t mean people care.

So how do we fix this? We make it more like college basketball…or, actually, college baseball.

Double Elimination Tournaments

If you’ve ever seen the College World Series or even the Little League World Series, you might remember this odd format they have for becoming champion. Essentially, a bunch of teams qualify for a tournament and square off. The winners advance and the losers play the other losers.

Once you lose twice, you go home. If you have 0 or 1 loss, you keep playing the other teams that haven’t been eliminated. While I’ll spare a lecture on whether this is the optimal way to choose a winner, I will say it creates a lot of intrigue as I’ll outline below.

But first, to make sure the mechanics are clear, let’s do a simple four team example. Team B is eliminated in the second round as it lost both games. Team D is eliminated in the third round and Team C is eliminated in the fourth round leaving Team A as champion. (If Team C had won Round 4, Team A & C would have had a rematch in Round 5 as they would each still have one loss.)

Round One	Result	Round Two	Result	Round Three	Result	Round 4	Result
Team A	Win	Team A	Win	Team A	Bye	Team A	Win = Champ!
Team B	Loss 1	Team D	Loss 1	Team B	Eliminated	Team C	Loss 2
Team C	Loss 1	Team B	Loss 2	Team C	Win	Team B	Eliminated
Team D	Win	Team C	Win	Team D	Loss 2	Team D	Eliminated

Twelve Team Double Elimination Wild Card

OK, here’s where we get crazy. Instead of a four team double elimination tournament, I want to do a twelve team one. Actually, two twelve team ones – one for the American League and one for the National League. Why?

There are 15 teams in each League. Each League is made up of three divisions. My proposal is each division champion gets a bye to its league semifinals (aka the Divisional Series). The fourth entrant in each Divisional Series would be the winner of the League’s twelve team tournament.

This means all 30 teams would be in the “playoffs” thus preserving interest across the country. No longer do you stop going to games in early August because your team is out of contention. No, you are hoping they will be the 8 seed in the elimination tournament instead of the 10 seed!

Now, you may only be in the playoffs for two games, but you are in! And baseball has a lot of variability on a daily basis that can lead to upsets (bad NFL or NBA teams win about 1/4 of their games where bad MLB teams win close to 40%).

See below for a hypothetical bracket of how the playoffs would work after the elimination tournament winners are crowned (if the format is unclear, start at the outside and work your way towards the middle as your team advances). This should look fairly familiar and these would continue as seven game series.

ALDS	ALCS	World Series	Champion	World Series	NLCS	NLDS
West Division						East Division
Central Division	West Division				East Division	West Division
		AL West	AL West	NL East
East Division	Wild Card				Central Division	Central Division
Wild Card Tournament						Wild Card Tournament

But how do we get that tournament winner crowned? Let’s do a quick run through of the mechanics. The twelve teams would be seeded by their record. The top four teams would get a bye while teams 5-12 would face off first. Thus, there is some reward for having a better record: you can earn that first bye or, even as the five seed, you get to play a bad team.

The Mechanics

Let’s do a hypothetical bracket below. I’ll have to break this into two parts for clarity (you can see it on one page here). If you want to skip the details, you can page ahead to the ten takeaways in the next section.

On the first day, the 5-12 teams play while the top four teams have their bye. On day two, the winners of day one advance to play the teams on bye. On day three, the teams that lost on days one and two play which mean we have our first eliminations on day three.

Day 1	Result	Day 2	Result	Day 3	Result
Team 8	Lose 0-1	Team 1	Win 1-0	Team 8	Lose 0-2
Team 9	Win 1-0	Team 9	Lose 1-1	Team 7	Win 2-1
Team 5	Win 1-0	Team 4	Lose 0-1	Team 12	Lose 0-2
Team 12	Lose 0-1	Team 5	Win 2-0	Team 3	Win 1-1
Team 6	Lose 0-1	Team 3	Lose 0-1	Team 6	Win 1-1
Team 11	Win 1-0	Team 11	Win 2-0	Team 4	Lose 0-2
Team 7	Win 1-0	Team 2	Win 1-0	Team 10	Win 1-1
Team 10	Lose 0-1	Team 7	Lose 1-1	Team 9	Lose 1-2

Next, we move to day four where the undefeated teams from day two play each other while the four one-loss teams also play each other to avoid elimination. We eliminate two more teams on days five and one each on days six and seven. The undefeated team after day five gets to rest until day eight.

Day 4	Result	Day 5	Result	Day 6	Result
Team 1	Lose 1-1	Team 5	Loss 3-1
Team 5	Win 3-0	Team 2	Win 3-0	Team 3	Win 4-1
Team 11	Lose 2-1			Team 10	Lose 3-2
Team 2	Win 2-0	Team 1	Lose 1-2
Team 7	Lose 2-2	Team 3	Win 3-1	Day 7
Team 3	Win 2-1
Team 6	Lose 1-2	Team 11	Lose 2-2	Team 5	Win 4-1
Team 10	Win 2-1	Team 10	Win 3-1	Team 3	Lose 4-2

Finally, on day eight, Team 2 squares off against Team 5. If Team 2 wins, they advance to the division round. If they lose, they play Team 5 again on day nine, since they will each only have one loss.

Why Is This Better???

Don’t worry if you couldn’t follow all of that. It would help if I could draw some arrows on the charts. Here are the key takeaways:

1) The 12 team tournament can be held in just over a week making it similar in length to a regular playoff series so it doesn’t change the timing of the World Series.
2) Every day (as of day three), there are new teams getting eliminated which means baseball is getting lots of media coverage each day rather than just at the end of a series.
3) Notice, we had some upsets in this hypothetical including the 10 seed making it until day 6 and the 11 seed winning its first two games.
4) Yet, like most tournaments, one of the top seeds usually wins (Team 2 in this case) so the end result is fairly similar in who makes the divisional playoff round…but with a lot more intrigue and excitement along the way.
5) Yes, obviously people will create office pools for this and pools create viewership and viewership means more ad $$$.
6) Oh, and this creates a lot more TV inventory than one extra wild card series between two teams. Each league has four games a day for the first four days and three on the fifth before declining to a game per day.
7) Those extra games are being watched in lots more cities now rather than just the two playing like we have today. One more reason the ratings will skyrocket.
8) People will likely care more about the divisional round now that they have a rooting interest in the wild card team, especially if there is a year where an underdog makes it.
9) I can’t emphasize enough how much it will improve attendance in August and September for the bottom half of the league where normally the fans would give up.
10) This adds all kinds of interesting strategy angles such as which teams to use your best pitcher against vs. when to cross your fingers and try to win with a lesser starter against a lesser opponent.

The only downside is “it’s confusing”. Yes, in the beginning it will be confusing, but once people get the hang of doing their pools, people will ask what took so long to come up with this.

Baseball needs to give people a reason to care. There are so many other things about the actual game on the field that need to be fixed, but you can say the same about college basketball and yet people watch for the drama. Baseball needs to create some more drama and this new playoff format does that relative to the long series we have today.