The Growing Irrelevance of Baseball's Regular Season

Major League Baseball recently decided to add two more wildcard teams to its postseason, further diluting its regular season. Last year, the World Series was once again without the best regular season team from either the American League or National League. Those teams, the New York Yankees and Philadelphia Phillies respectively, both lost in the first round of the playoffs. Prior to 1969, they would have been the two teams battling it out in the Fall Classic, as we have come it know it. Instead, we had the Texas Rangers, winners of the American League West with the league's second best record, against the St. Louis Cardinals, the National League's wildcard team.

1969 was the year when the regular season's best teams were no longer guaranteed a trip to the WORLD Series. That's when both leagues were split into Eastern and Western divisions, with the winners of each advancing to their respective League Championship Series (LCS), and those two winners advancing to the WORLD Series. Very often, there would be a real disparity between the regular season records of THE division winners, with the team with the inferior record winning the league championship series.

An extreme case was in 1973, when the Cincinnati Reds won the National League West with the best record in baseball, and the New York Mets won the National League East while barely finishing above the.500 mark. However, the Mets ended up winning the best-of-five League Championship Series and advancing to the World Series. (NOTE: The LCS was not updated to a best-of-seven series until 1985).

An even more bizarre thing occurred in 1981, when the Reds, the team that had the best cumulative regular season record in the National League West, and the St. Louis Cardinals, the team that had the best cumulative regular season record IN THE National League East, both failed to qualify for postseason play at all! That's because a mid-season strike that year forced the season to be split in half, with an opening round of playoffs that had the first half winner of each division squaring off against its second half winner. In the National League West, the Los Angeles Dodgers were the first half winners (beating out the Reds by a mere half a game), and the Houston Astros were the second half winners. In the National League East, the Phillies were the first half winners while the Montreal Expos were the second half winners.

But things got even worse in 1995, when the current postseason format was first implemented. That's when the leagues were split into three divisions each, with each division winner and a wildcard team (the non-division winner with the best record) making the postseason. This created an extra round of playoffs that involved four best-of-five matchups called the League Division Series (LDS) that would have to be played prior to each league's LCS. Since this format began, wildcard teams have advanced to the World Series almost as often as teams possessing a league's best regular season record.

It appears that Major League Baseball is getting more and more like the National Hockey League (NHL), in which there is absolutely no correlation between its regular season and the outcome of its postseason. In other words, baseball's regular season is becoming almost completely irrelevant. Perhaps both MLB and the NHL should just cut to the chase each year by skipping the regular season and going directly to the playoffs. After all, what do all those regular season baseball games really mean anyway? Just ask the Yankees and Phillies - and Cardinals.