In praise of a second wildcard

by bbjones on Sep 1, 2011 2:19 PM EDT

Talk of expanding the playoffs in the immediate future seems to have died down. That seems strange, given the exceedingly boring nature of the races this year.

In the AL, the Yanks and Sox are in. No drama there. Detroit has a pretty solid hold on the weak Central. The Angels still have an outside shot at the West, but it's not likely. The Rays are 7.5 games out of the Wild Card, so nothin' doin' there, either.

This makes the AL Wild Card pointless. Neither East team has much incentive to try to beat the other. Home field advantage is nice, but resting your starters and setting up your rotation is better. Not even ESPN can cook up something interesting to say about that race.

Things aren't much better in the NL. The Phillies have it wrapped up, of course, as do the Brewers. The Cards and Giants are about 9 games out of the Wild Card, so you can hand that to the Braves. Unless the Gigantes somehow discover the secret to scoring runs (hint: get some hits first), the D-Backs will take the West.

So, here it is September 1st, and all the races are basically wrapped up.

Now, pretend with me that there was a second wild card in each league, with a one-game playoff. In the NL, the Cards and Giants would be feverishly trying to squeeze ahead of each other, currently separated by half a game. If the Cards win, you move the last game (Wed Sep 28th vs. Houston) up to a day game. Thursday the 29th, Cards play the Braves in a winner-take-all. You add one solid playoff race (Giants/Cards) and make the Braves sweat out the season, trying to catch Philly to avoid the 1-gamer.

In the AL, Tampa Bay and the Angels are separated by only 1.5 games. So add another race there. And now, down the stretch, you have the Titanic Struggle of All Titanic Struggles, where the Yanks and Sox claw and scratch for the all-important division title. Nobody wants to face either the Rays or Angels in a 1-game series.

So, instead of exactly zero interesting races, you'd have 3 interesting races, with one of them dominating all MLB sports coverage 24/7. The beauty of the second wild-card is that it actually makes winning the division more important, not less.

More revenue, more excitement, more importance on winning all season long. What's not to like?

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I am not in favor of adding crappy teams to the playoffs just to make exciting races.

by Gapper on Sep 1, 2011 3:47 PM EDT reply actions

how far does that go?

To the purist, we should get rid of the divisions, and put all 16 NL teams in the same pot. This definitely minimizes the randomness in the pennant winner, but also means that almost all teams are out of it by July.

As far as I’m concerned, we already added the crappy teams, and didn’t get exciting races either.

"The USA despite its flaws and corruption and overall messiness is still a great and powerful instrument of freedom and hope for the entire world." - Madville

by bbjones on Sep 1, 2011 4:10 PM EDT up reply actions

This year is uniquely boring, it seems

I think we’ve seen a Game 163 on three occasions int he last last four years. Most regular seasons have better finishes than this one will.

by ken on Sep 1, 2011 4:55 PM EDT up reply actions

But the Wild Card did create new drama, and on a large scale fixed the problem of good teams being kept out of the raise due to geopgraphy

Prior to the Wild Card it was possible that the second best team in the league (like the 1993 Giants) could be kept out of the playoffs. But then again at the same time from what I have read about the 93 West race, is it was pretty compelling and exciting baseball that lasted for months.

But the Wild Card has allowed more good teams to enter the playoffs allowing for the Marlins to win two World Series despite sharing a division with the Braves, gave Boston multiple playoff births and some pretty great ALCS’s,among other things.

As Ken says below me this year is uniquely boring, last year the NL West and the Wild Card were not settled into the final weekend, most years it seems the races run pretty deep into the year. 2007 had an epic comeback from the Rockies and one of the best single game playoff games ever.

This year there is just a large divide between the good and bad teams. Really the Rays are the only team that will be shutout that really could make a legitimate claim that they belong there but won’t be. This year the Yankees or Red Sox will take the A.L. Wild Card, both are teams that are much better than the Rays, or the Angels; do you really think the Yankees or Red Sox, who strongly outplayed Tampa in their own division over 162 games, or outplayed Anaheim in a tougher division, should be knocked out of the playoffs due to one bad game.

Same for the N.L., the Braves are heads and tails better than the Giants and St. Louis, but both the Cards and even more so San Francisco have top of the staff aces who can dominate one game at a time, and if the Braves starter has one off night a 162 game body of work is washed away by one game against a strongly inferior team.

It will get better.

by Yossarian22 on Sep 1, 2011 7:18 PM EDT up reply actions

Yossi is the voice of reason

Making the Braves play the Cards/Giants in a one-game playoff is really unfair. Making Boston play who the hell ever in a 1-game playoff is really unfair.

If there is a way to set it up so that the most clearly inferior teams play the 1-game playoff, that’s better, but I don’t see how you can do that.

expectations are premeditated resentments - cheshirecat

by kcgard2 on Sep 2, 2011 8:45 AM EDT up reply actions

You could also say that the Wild Card has greatly diluted the quality of the playoff field

In the pre-expansion/division era, you had to be the top team in an eight-team league to play in the WS. Sounds tough but reasonable. After the expansions in ’62 and ’69 it made sense to split the leagues into divisions, giving each team a 1 in 6 chance at the postseason. A little easier to make the postseason now, but still tough. Following the ’94 realignment, NL teams now have a 1 in 4 chance of making the playoffs.

I don’t mind the current system, but there’s something to be said about the “loser goes home” division races. The Braves/Giants race you mentioned (Dusty’s first year) was captivating. I can remember grabbing the sports page in the morning to see what had happened. It’d be neat to see the same thing with Bos/Nyy now, rather than having two teams simply try to finish the year healthy, knowing they’ll be in the playoffs either way.

by ken on Sep 2, 2011 9:39 AM EDT up reply actions

I wish I was old enough to appreciate the 93 race.

The first year I really paid attention was 95, so 6 divisions and wild card is all I know.

It will get better.

by Yossarian22 on Sep 2, 2011 9:48 AM EDT up reply actions

Obviously written by a ghost writer

needs more typos

A Ongreed the Deserving
-coviner's lawful neutral Paladin / Debutante character

by supergrover on Sep 6, 2011 8:49 AM EDT up reply actions

SSS

Let a man come in and do the Popcorn.

by -ManBearPig on Sep 1, 2011 3:48 PM EDT reply actions

Actually, LSS

Lazy Sample Size. One could, with sufficient patience, do this exercise for as many seasons as you care to look at. I expect there will be many more seasons where it gets more interesting than seasons where it gets less interesting. I lack that patience, instead filling that part of me with laziness.

The only way it gets less interesting is if the first wild card is a lot less good than the division winner, and the 2nd wild card is really mediocre. Then you have a 1-game playoff between two meh teams. No biggie, it’s over quick, and then the winner gets demolished in the next round.

"The USA despite its flaws and corruption and overall messiness is still a great and powerful instrument of freedom and hope for the entire world." - Madville

by bbjones on Sep 1, 2011 4:14 PM EDT up reply actions

The problem I have with this

is that one game is far too few to decide which is the better baseball team. It might be more fun, but it’s brutally reductive.

I’d actually rather see a shorter season and longer playoff series. Like 11 or 13 game series.

by Charlie Scrabbles on Sep 1, 2011 4:19 PM EDT reply actions

It is, but I don't mind if it's just between the two wild card teams

I like the idea of rewarding the division winners with something more than a better seed. Right now there’s very little incentive for NYY or BOS to win the AL East. Punishing the loser of those two by making it play in the one-game playoff would add a little drama to what is often a boring regular season finale in the AL.

by ken on Sep 1, 2011 4:52 PM EDT up reply actions

so rather than BOS or NYY get a better seed

you would rather they be punished for their division have the best and second best team in the league?

It will get better.

by Yossarian22 on Sep 1, 2011 7:28 PM EDT up reply actions

Yes, I would like to see as much punishment for BOS or NYY as possible

The purist’s argument is that only top team from each league truly deserves to be in the World Series, since the idea is that the best team in each league squares off. Any other team qualifying for the postseason under the current system should be happy to be there and get ready to jump through hoops if they want to play in the WS. I’m not saying I completely agree with the purist’s argument, but I do like the idea of giving the top seed some advantage other than homefield.

by ken on Sep 2, 2011 9:27 AM EDT up reply actions

How short do you go?

As it is, the 162-game season is often too short to figure out the best team.

Doing the stats exactly correct is quite tricky, but you can get close with an easy approximation. Suppose a team has an intrinsic winning percentage W%, and the actual number of wins it gets in a season is drawn from a binomial distribution with that average W%. By using the error on the binomial estimate, you can find the 1-sigma variation on the number of wins you get.

Now, really you want the extreme value distribution of all the teams in the division, to ask what the probability that the team with the highest intrinsic W% actually ends up with the most wins. That is quite tricky, and I’m too lazy to try it. But if you plug into the confidence interval for a binomial, with a W% around .500, you get 0.040, or about 6 wins. It doesn’t change much if you boost W% to 0.600.

Very roughly speaking, that means that if you take 6 wins off a teams total, you can be about 85% (1-sigma, 1-sided) sure that their “true” win total is that high, or higher. Even more roughly speaking, if you win your division by 6 wins (running away, right?) there’s still a 15% chance you aren’t the best team. If you only win by 3 games, there’s a 30% chance you aren’t best team.

Granted, this doesn’t change much if you knock it down to a 150-game season. The binomial error goes up, but the number of games goes down, and you still need about 6 games to get to 85%.

However, you’ve got the same problem with a series. The win% error in a 7-game series is 0.189, meaning basically that if two teams intrinsic win% are within .200 of each other (that is, everyone), then you have a sizable probability that either team could win. (To do this right, you really need to apply binomials to both sides, and look at the difference. For ballpark numbers, this is close enough.) So, that’s the conventional wisdom that “anything can happen in a short series.”

Trouble is, even in a best of 13, the error on the binomial estimate is still 0.139. That is still a huge margin of error — nearly that between the Reds’ current W% and the Phillies’.

Conclusion: Dumb luck is always going to play a huge part in baseball standings. Given that the season is poorly designed as a measurement device on the quality of teams, it might as well be entertaining.

"The USA despite its flaws and corruption and overall messiness is still a great and powerful instrument of freedom and hope for the entire world." - Madville

by bbjones on Sep 1, 2011 5:12 PM EDT up reply actions 4 recs

Rec'd

by Charlie Scrabbles on Sep 1, 2011 5:51 PM EDT up reply actions

11 or 13 game series would be brutal

That is just way too long. I personally think seven is the sweet spot. I could envision 9 at the absolute max, but I wouldn’t endorse it.

expectations are premeditated resentments - cheshirecat

by kcgard2 on Sep 2, 2011 8:49 AM EDT up reply actions

The one feasible change I would like to see is in the timing of the postseason series.

I would like as many of the filler off-days removed from the series as possible – they allow teams to recycle their rotation much faster, which means that any unspectacular team with a few high-end arms can take down a better overall team with a deeper rotation – it hides their deficiency.

I know they like to stagger the games so they don’t conflict with each other, and you could watch every minute of every division series game if you so desired, but other than that, the teams play back to back games all year, they don’t need to be pampered at the end. Travel days, and that’s it.

Besides, they are already finishing the season well into November these days, and a longer postseason period certainly does not equal a better one (see: hockey).

by Gapper on Sep 1, 2011 6:59 PM EDT reply actions 1 recs

But they can play 4 games in a day without a conflict so I think it is plenty possible

You have a 1 PM, a 4PM, a 7PM, and a 10PM game, and problem solved.

It will get better.

by Yossarian22 on Sep 1, 2011 7:21 PM EDT up reply actions

This is the change I'd make as well

and thankfully, I think they have decided to eliminate one or two off-days from the playoff series this year (or does it start next year?). This change is long overdue.

expectations are premeditated resentments - cheshirecat

by kcgard2 on Sep 2, 2011 8:51 AM EDT up reply actions

W stands for!

It will get better.

by Yossarian22 on Sep 1, 2011 7:04 PM EDT reply actions

definitely a good argument

"The USA despite its flaws and corruption and overall messiness is still a great and powerful instrument of freedom and hope for the entire world." - Madville

by bbjones on Sep 1, 2011 7:50 PM EDT up reply actions

uh, what?

“Neither East team has much incentive to try to beat the other.”

You might be able to say that about any other random pairing of teams within a division. There might be occasion where one team relishes beating the snot out of the other, but not necessarily both. For this pair of teams, there is always incentive to try to beat the other. Always. Even when they were both less than great.

A Ongreed the Deserving
-coviner's lawful neutral Paladin / Debutante character

by supergrover on Sep 6, 2011 8:03 AM EDT reply actions