Let me start off by saying that I think major league baseball playoffs are awesome. Since the creation of the wild card, MLB has been thoroughly entertaining to watch during the months of September and October (and even November sometimes). The main reason I feel this way is because the Phillies have been heavily involved and successful in these months the last 3 years. Another reason is because, after such a long season, it's nice to see games really matter (Side note: obviously every regular season game matters and determines whether a team makes the playoffs or not but in the regular season if you lose a game, there are a bunch of games after that where a team can bounce back. At the end of the regular season and in the postseason, not so much). My question is this: After a 162 game season, why is the first round only 5 games? The best team does not always win in a 5 game series. If the weaker team has the best pitcher, they can easily win the 2 games he'd pitch. That means all they have to do is get lucky 1 other game to win the series. I guess you could say that that team deserves to win, since they have the better pitcher. Or that if the other team is in fact better then they should win regardless. And maybe you'd be right. I'm just saying, why not make it a 7-game series to be sure? I mean, they play 162 games to figure out who should make the playoffs. They can't play 7 games to see who makes it to the second round? That's silly to me. If they're worried about the playoffs going too deep into November then I would suggest shortening the regular season a lil bit. If they wouldn't want to shorten the season because clubs would lose out on some money, then I'd say I have a tough time feeling bad for billionaire owners missing out on some cash. Fans from teams that aren't gonna make the playoffs don't go to the games at the end of the season anyway. The point is, adding 2 games to the first round and/or shortening the regular season by at least 2 games isn't gonna have drastic consequences, except we'll know who the better team definitely is.
The next thing that bothers me is the scheduling of these playoff games. This aspect of the postseason doesn't irk me nearly as much as my first reason but it is something I'd like to see tweeked if possible. For starters, the fact that no 2 games are played at the same time leads to some problems. This causes a number of games to be played in the afternoon, when most people are at work. Since no games can be played at the same time, obviously you'd want to small market teams to play in the early games and big market teams to play later in primetime, so more people can watch the more popular teams. But what about fans who wait all year (or even years) for their team to make the playoffs, only to have their team's playoff games scheduled at 1 o'clock in the afternoon during the week. This may not be too big of problem for the fans of the 2 teams playing (taking a half day at work or being "sick" that day will free up the time) but what about those who can't take off? What about casual fans of MLB who would watch this game if it was on at night? I wonder how much worse ratings would be if 2 games were on 2 different networks at the same time. Maybe there was research done to determine that the way they do it now is the best way to air these games. Or maybe MLB determined that the typical basbeball fan is a college student or unemployed (highly likely in this economy), but again I wonder.
Another possible disadvantage of playing day games is, sometimes they are played at times when shadows come into play. What if these shadows start between the pitcher's mound and home plate, making it difficult for batters to see pitches? Do we really want a playoff game decided that way? Granted it will probably be the same disadvantage for both teams and players have to deal with this at times during the regular season, but I think it is something they shouldn't have to worry about in the playoffs. I'm being kinda picky here but I think it is something to consider.
Another problem is the lay off in between games. Sometimes this can't be avoided, like when one team sweeps a series but another series takes the maximum amount of games. Obviously you can't start the next round until the first round is over. Another thing that can't be avoided are off days for travel. It's a stretch to call this a problem because there's only so much MLB can do here. It's really just a part of postseason play but this is significantly different than how teams play during the regular season. Teams play almost every single day for 6 months, then in the playoffs, they get a day off every 2 or 3 days. And of course there's the possibility I cited above, when teams can have almost a whole week off before playing another game. Baseball players are creatures of habit. So when something happens to change their habits, it's gonna affect their performance. Pitchers pitch once every 4 or 5 days so they aren't really affected by this. Batters, on the other hand, are negativle affected. It's hard to get into a groove as a hitter when you're not batting, in game situations, regularly. So baseball playoffs are all about pitching whereas the regular season is more balanced. This is a significant difference.
Obviously all these things I mentioned aren't huge problems. The MLB postseason is very entertaining and appears to be a success each year, especially when the Yankees or Red Sox are involved. It just seems that MLB is more interested in making as much money as possible on postseason games instead of making sure they are unbiased for the teams involved and convenient for fans. It'll be interesting to see if any of this changes over the years and, also, if MLB becomes more comfortable with utilizing instant replay (which may be material for another post at a later date, if you're lucky).
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