The Diamond Fan

Hank Steinbrenner, the inheritor of the New York Yankees, has a column in this week’s Sporting News in which he bemoans the current playoff system in baseball.  He singles out the Dodgers, this year’s winner of the NL West, as being unworthy of being in the playoffs.  I suppose that now that the Yankees were unable to buy their way into the playoffs for the first time in 13 years the system is a “mess that needs to be cleaned up.”  His basic premise is that only the “best” teams should get into the playoffs and in his mind most of the “best” teams are in the AL East.

His proposed solution is to do away with divisions and just take the four best winning percentages in each league an put them into the playoffs, a sort of poor man’s NBA system.  This is such a breathtakingly stupid idea that it could only come from a man who got his position based on his ancestry instead of his thinking.

Let me get this straight: you want to take the one single thing that baseball still has going for it in comparison to the other sports (the pennant race) and do away with it entirely.  Poof, bang, ka-pow! Gone. No more pennant races.  No more Red Sox- Yankees in the summer of ‘49 or in 1978, no more Dodgers-Giants in ‘51, ‘62 or any number of other years.  No more Joe Morgan hitting a home run in San Francisco to put a dagger in the hated Dodgers at the end of the ‘82 season.  No more Cubs-Mets in 1969, no more Braves coming from 2 games back in 1991 to win their first division title in a decade.  Yeah, great idea, Hank.  Let’s turn baseball’s regular season into the same semi-exhibition season we get in the NBA.  No point in trying to WIN a pennant, just finish in the upper echelon and we’ll be OK.  Let the best teams spend September gearing up for the real show instead of competing for a title.  If you want baseball to fall even further behind the NFL in popularity than it already is, I couldn’t think of a better way to do it.

Look, I would be the first to admit that this year there are probably five or six American League teams that are better on paper than the Dodgers.  So what?  The Dodgers knew what they had to do to win this season and they did it.  That’s W-I-N, not finish fourth.  Now they get a shot in the playoffs, as they should.  I hate to break it to you, Hank, but there was a very long period of time in the 60s and 70s when the very best American League team would have been no better than 5th or sixth best in the National League, due mostly to the league’s relative slowness to integrate.  Again, so what?  Some of those American League teams managed to come thorough in the Series and win, and as far as I’m concerned they deserve to be remembered as champions.  They won, and as you say, “it’s all about wins.”  They won their division, they won their League Championship Series, they won the World Series.  They were (and are) champions.  They didn’t finish in fourth freakin’ place and then get hot at the right time. Give me a break!

Steinbrenner is right in one respect: the current playoff system is not the best.  But his proposed solution is 1,000% worse.  My preference would be be to go back to two divisions in each league and just have a League Championship Series. Champion versus champion to determine the league’s representative in the World Series.  It’s not gonna happen, because the playoffs are such a cash cow for MLB, so I’ll accept the current eight team playoff with most of the teams coming in as division winners.  I can’t abide any kind of “finish fourth and you’re golden” garbage.

The real problem is that currently teams in the same division don’t play exactly the same schedule, mostly due to inter-league play.  This makes for a somewhat unlevel playing field, but the good thing is that a 162 game season levels things out quite a bit, especially compared to the element of chance that exists in a short playoff series.  In my mind, anything that reduces the significance of baseball’s regular season is bad, bad, bad, and should be avoided at all cost.

Shame on you, Whinebrenner!  Stop bitching and enjoy watching the division winners (there’s that “win” word again) and the single most worthy non-winner in each league compete for the right to be called champion.