Major League Baseball is evolving.
With the unbeatable popularity of the NFL conquering fans across the United States, the MLB has had to respond, and it has. It has addressed complaints about the quality of umpiring by gradually introducing more and more instant replay. Next year, replay will be as much a part of the sport as it is in football.
The MLB also introduced some consistency to the structure of its divisions by moving the Houston Astros from the six-team National League Central to the four-team American League West, standardizing divisions at five teams apiece across the league.
And perhaps most importantly, MLB commissioner Bud Selig expanded baseball’s most valuable asset, the playoffs, by adding a pair of wild card games.
The benefits of this expansion are undeniable.
With the addition of another team to the playoffs, more fans from more markets have a reason to be engaged in the playoffs.
In 2012 and 2013, the years that the wild card game has been a part of the playoffs, an average of five teams finished the season within five games back of earning a wild card spot. From 2006 to 2011, that average was just over two. The addition of the wild card game has given almost three markets something to root for toward the end of the regular season.
More attention from fans results in better TV ratings, more merchandise sales and more press coverage.
According to Businessweek, the 2012 wild card playoff games attracted an average of 4.6 million viewers per game. The 2013 NL wild card game between the Cincinnati Reds and Pittsburgh Pirates brought in 4.7 million viewers alone. More than nine million viewers have tuned in to the wild card games each year, and that’s something Selig has to be happy about.
The one flaw with the playoff expansion is that there isn’t enough expansion. Adding two more teams to the mix is great, but a one-game playoff isn’t the perfect answer.
Teams play 162 games in the regular season, and having one game to decide whether or not they move on isn’t consistent with the rest of the sport. Every playoff round except the wild card game is a five- or seven-game series, and most regular-season series are three games.
In the playoffs, teams are defined by the depth of their starting pitching rotations, and having just one game takes away that element. A three-game series might push back the end of the World Series to November, but it’s worth the delay. The three-game wild card series would also reward division champions with a couple extra days of rest before the playoffs start.
Even with this flaw, the new, expanded playoffs are better than anything that existed before. With regular-season NFL games still taking the lion’s share of TV viewers even with playoff baseball going on, the MLB had to make a change to stay relevant.
It did, and the benefits are already apparent.