ATLANTA — From 1903 through 1994, a team had to finish first in something to have a chance at winning the World Series. That held until the 1993 Giants won 103 games but went nowhere, having been edged by the Braves on the season’s final day. Thus was MLB moved to reward teams that didn’t finish first.
Owing to the players’ strike, the ‘94 World Series wasn’t played. The first wild cards were dealt in 1995. Over the next 17 seasons, a second-place team won the World Series six times. This was especially galling to the Braves, who took 14 consecutive division titles but won it all only once. The Marlins of the same NL East won it all twice. Yeesh.
In 2011, both wild cards were determined on the season’s final night. After losing their 162nd game in 13 innings, the Braves saw St. Louis, which entered September 8 1/2 games back, nose them out. Naturally, the Cardinals won the World Series. A half-hour later, Tampa Bay claimed the AL wild card by winning in 12 innings, the Rays having overcome Boston’s nine-game September lead.
This got MLB to thinking, never a good thing. If one wild card per league could yield such drama, imagine what two might do! This yielded the play-in game, which sounded terrible and turned out worse. The Braves claimed one of two wild cards in 2012. Naturally, they lost to St. Louis. The Braves’ 2012 postseason lasted three hours and nine minutes, not counting a 19-minute delay to clear Turner Field of thrown objects.
Over the next decade, two play-in winners — the 2014 Giants of Madison Bumgarner, the 2019 Nationals of Stephen Strasburg — would become World Series champ. At no time did anyone in the sport expressed deep affection for the game itself.
Rather than heighten the allure of a playoff berth, the play-in game quashed enthusiasm. When contemplating deadline moves, clubs began to ask if a postseason that might be one-and-done — insiders dubbed it “the coin-flip game” — was worth the risk. Come 2022, the play-in game was itself done, which is where we are now.
If we go by appearances, two installments of the 12-teams/six-wild-card playoff were all it took for teams to re-recalibrate. The 2022 World Series included one wild card. The 2023 event featured two. Already we’ve learned that the difference between a play-in game and a Round 1 series, even if that series can end in two games, is immense.
In 2021, the last year of the play-in, only one postseason participant — the Braves, who would win the World Series — won fewer than 90 games. Both 2022 and 2023 saw three such qualifiers. The past two NL champs were wild cards who entered October as No. 6 seeds.
The presumed benefits of winning enough games to skip Round 1 haven’t panned out. The presumed disadvantages of having to play an extra series haven’t been apparent. Non-bye teams went 8-8 in 2022 Division Round games; in 2023, non-bye teams went 10-4.
The sport of baseball is often silly. Those who work for baseball teams are not. They see what’s happening. They noticed when, of the seven 100-win teams in 2022 and 2023, six didn’t win a playoff round. Maybe it’s happenstance, but no MLB team is on track to win 100 games this season.
No employee of any club has, for public consumption, said, “We don’t care about winning our division,” but current events seem an indication of … well, something. Not to sound prosecutorial, but not many teams appear to be running flat-out. Not to sound namby-pamby, but why would they? Even the Phillies, who spent much of last fall proclaiming themselves Built For October, seem to have downshifted in August.
As someone who has considered the sixth-month regular season the true test of a team, I can’t say I’m thrilled by this. (If indeed “this” is a thing, as opposed to an aberration.) At the same time, I can’t blame teams for acknowledging reality.
You can’t win the World Series unless you get to October, but if you’re pretty sure you’ll make it — FanGraphs assigns 11 teams at least a 75% chance at a playoff berth, of which there are 12 — does it matter how many games you win? Come the postseason, everybody’s 0-0.
The Braves of 2022 and 2023 won 205 regular-season games but were 1-3 in consecutive Octobers. The 2021 Braves weren’t very good until October. Which of those teams do we recall more fondly?
