The simple MLB playoff plan that might have been | The Notional League
The simple MLB playoff plan that might have been | The Notional League
How could baseball have better protected the integrity of the regular season and had a unique playoff structure? Hindsight is 20/20, but it needed to stop being obsessed with what the NFL was doing.
Writin’ exercise: takes an idea someone threw out there, for this athletics supporter to be served back into the universe. For all of it, click the headline.
The Notional Idea
‘Baseball should at most have six teams in the playoffs.’
For fun’s sake, imagine it coming from Dave Rose, Happy Endings’ resident go-to idea man, and a Chicago Cubs fan.
It applies to this playoff season in Major League Baseball. Three of the six teams that can raise a division-champ banner have been bounced, and two others have lost at least twice in the best-of-5 format ‘regional final.’ First, though, we need a sidebar about that Bob Costas fellow.
Sidebar
So, on the TBS ’cast of the Yankees-Royals game on Wednesday, Bob Costas tossed out the “lies, damned lies, and statistics” aphorism and attributed it to the American humorist Mark Twain.
However, Twain might have run a ‘quiet con’ a century ago. He oft-credited it to the 19th-century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, likely knowing full well that Americans would just log that and “some Englishman.” BookBrowse.com says the credit for the line goes to a British statesman named Arthur James Balfour.1
Balfour. Now there is a baseball name.
The mentally unhealthful reality is
Twelve of the 30 teams qualify for the World Series playoff tournament; because of media revenue.
It is like mixing operating systems. Regular-season MLB is a local game built on local followership. Then it tries to cosplay as a national one and hopes to avoid a Diamondbacks-Rangers World Series.
Does the greatest team win? Enh. September used to be tense; now it is seed-sorting tedium.
One suspects in MLB, where the control moved out of the dugout in the last 10 years, are figuring out that part. Big-payroll teams try to get out front, then cruise control over the final weeks. Everyone else floats in the middle class. It also means less incentive to innovate and invest in nurturing talent.
This season, only the Shohei Ohtani/Mookie Betts-led L.A. Dodgers played .600-plus ball, going 98-64. That was a pullout stat John-Paul Morosi, on the same TBS ’cast, said the gap between top teams and the pack has “never” been tighter.
Never? Four teams nadired between .253 and .389. The vagabond-bound Athletics made it five teams with fewer than 70 wins.
The sport was much more compact in the decade or so between the ’81 and ’94 strikes. In about 10 seconds, one could make a screenshot showing a representative season, where there was also just one .600-ball team, but only one sub-.400 team.
This is so 1991:
Anyway, the current system does not create urgency at either end of the stick. Paring the number of playoff teams would do that. How did MLB lose the plot?
Ret-connaissance — back up a bit to find the force multiplier.
Throw it back to around 1962 and ’63, the first time an MLB team took 120 L’s in a season. Baseball has just expanded from 16 to 20 teams, mostly to get the United States Congress off its back about the antitrust exemption.
The American Football League is pushing the NFL. This is the new frontier, and the cool kids are young-thinking running rings around status-quo stodges such as early-seasons Mad Men Pete Campbell.
In sportswriting, smartalecs are aware of a cultural shift. At this time, yes, they are mostly white-presenting men. They know time is running out on old thinking — unless they want to be newspaper publishers.
Meet the character who is not there. Bill Veeck.
Why have sportsball teams become a must-have for Rich Dudes, at the turn of the 1950s and ’60s?
Some would point to the emergence of television and advances in airplane travel making it easier to fly to away games. Eisenhower-era tax codes also encourage re-investment instead of hoarding billionaires. Building infrastructure means a Republican administration in the States and various centrist governing parties in Canada tax the shyte out of Rich Dudes. Many Rich Dudes who want to own sportsball teams are second-gen scions of fossil-fuel fortunes.
They have become tax shelters due largely to a True Baseball Man Bill Veeck, the promoter-operator.2 Pop-sports history often misses how the greatest Veeck innovation was convincing revenuers to allow RDA (Roster Depreciation Allowance).
The premise was the same as anything. A car loses its value as soon as one drives it off the lot. A ballplayer begins to lose monetary value once he is put to good use.
Oh, so that is why the Blue Jays have held on to George Springer?
How were Baseball and Football deciding champions before 1960?
One direct final between the best team from two groupings.
Baseball is two mostly autonomous American and National leagues with a pact to meet in the World Series. The NFL has two divisions labelled East and West.
Simple, straightforward. If there is a dead heat, well, there are provisos to hold a special playoff.
Its credibility hinges on having (a) a clear winner in each group and (b) no doubt the top two teams are playing, meaning they cannot be in the same grouping.
How is Baseball responding to new-money disruptors?
The solons of baseball quash any push to adapt — shocker. What is good for the Yankees, who won 15-of-18 league pennants and nine World Series titles after the racist line was broken in 1947, must be good enough for everyone else!3
They believe they can outlast ’em all. Think Krusty the Clown reacting to news that The Gabbo Show will be coming to Springfield’s TV boxes.
Through the post-war years, major-league baseball has consolidated the labor market for ballplayers, limiting it to men. Men who are racialized also face a lot of stress loading if they want to play; no citation needed. All the while, there is a theme this is the sport that best demonstrates the principles of American democracy (and Canadian!).
Here, Philomena Cunk would deadpan, and in the true spirit of that democracy, they were content to let women’s and Black-led leagues die, made regional ‘open classification’ leagues subservient instead of opening a path to major-league-hood, and reacted with vengeance when other investors wanted to build stable domestic leagues in the Caribbean and Mexico… those places where America was trying to import democracy. Alanis Morrissette might call it ironic, but she is Canadian, and doesn’t know what ironic means.
At the turn of the decade, the Continental League concept is floated. Some of the movers behind it include:
Branch Rickey, yes, that Branch Rickey;
William Shea, namesake of Shea Stadium;
Bob Howsam, founder of football’s Denver Broncos and front-office architect of baseball’s 1970s Cincinnati Big Red Machine, the one Pete Rose graced;
Hamilton.-born Jack Kent Cooke, the future “best owner in the history of sports,”4 who developed the Forum in Southern California where (after he moved on) the Showtime Lakers and the Gretzky Kings stimulated interest in basketball and hockey; became controlling partner of the Washington NFL team, where (branded racism aside), he entrusted Joe Gibbs to show one-back, three-wideout offences could work in nasty Northeast weather, to the count of three Super Bowl wins with as many quarterbacks, including pioneering Black QB Doug Williams.
Yeah, Baseball. You do not want any part of this ambition.
How is Football responding to new-money disruptors?
At this stage, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle and his bosses are resolved to a three-pronged strategy for the American Football League (AFL).
Label the principal partners in the league as The Silly Club, since the AFL concept has come and gone at least twice.
They do have serious cash, though. Texas-tea money. One counter is to admit the Dallas Cowboys to the NFL to add a degree of difficulty for Lamar Hunt and his Dallas AFL team.5
Separate a group from the AFL pack by offering them an expansion franchise. Ce serait les Vikings du Minnesota, naturellement.6 The Silly Club loses a Midwestern stoicism for, take a wild guess who fills out their Inaugural Octet.7The NFL has also proof that Football, will be a better TV sport than baseball.
However, we are discussing who figured out how to be a Playoff Sport.
What signs were there that the Yankees’ dominance was coming around as downfall?
Newspapers probably printed a cumulative linescore from the 1960 World Series. The Yankees outscored the Pirates 2:1 — and lost in seven games. It takes a talent to do that. It’s not good that one team is so much better-resourced, and yet reacts so poorly when an underdog steps up.
Fun fact: comedian Lenny Bruce attended his one-and-only major-league baseball game on Oct. 13, 1960, Game 7 at the Pirates’ Forbes Field. Home runs in high-lev situs by Hal Smith and Bill Mazeroski got the Pirates over for what was seen as a stunning upset.8
What happened to that Continental League?
The best resource is the Michael Shapiro-penned Bottom of the Ninth: Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball from Itself (Times Books, 2009).
To shake the Continental League, the AL runs the Ply-and-Pry pattern, through a three-team expansion-relation scheme. Its Washington, D.C., team has a nepo baby sole proprietor, Calvin Griffith, who has been courting other cities, so let him re-open his baseball shop as the Minnesota Twins. Washington gets an expansion team with the same name. Go in second to the Southern California-Los Angeles market.
The NL grants the leaders of the Houston and New York groups the teams now known as the Astros and Mets. So baseball is the same format but with 10-team leagues.
What foreshadowing, if any, might have been available that showed baseball needed a legitimate playoff system?
Was there a known stat that might have made younger people wonder? The first 10-team league season is the 1961 AL. By this time, winning percentage — ‘they’re playing sub-.500 ball’ — is baseball vernacular years before the pocket calculator.
Someone who is not hewn to league lines between the AL and NL — and that hewing lingered till well into this century — might see the newspaper agate and wonder why 101-win Detroit is left out while 93-win Cincinnati goes directly to the World Series.
That though might have come from a junior skeptic, one of those Boys or Girls Who Remember Baseball Statistics. In October 1961, think about it, Bill James turned 12 years old. Age 12 is when one is at maximum opinionation about sports.9
So, in ’62, it is the first season with two 10-team leagues. And, retrospectively, similar deal where the two winningest teams, and top teams by run differential, appear to be in the same league.
Why do the 96-win Yankees get the wave-in for the World Series. What about the 101-wins-apiece Dodgers and Giants, or the 98-win Reds?10 Boomer children are wondering.
Is there time for one more in the service of a stretch for a joke? In 1964, both races go to the wire. The Pholdin’ Phils, who blew the pennant with a 10-loss streak in the final two weeks of the schedule, become the year’s lead story.
Two teenage siblings were drawn into those pennant races. Their sadness over the Phillies eventually off-loads to realizing the White Sox and Orioles got hosed. That will give one of them the idea to craft underdog stories for the moviegoing masses.
Who could those two teenage siblings in 1964 have been? You guessed it — Sylvester and Frank Stallone!
Perhaps some fans want playoffs. We don’t know. Frankly, we don’t want to know.
In the long view, one can only read thought through inaction. A theme that runs through reading historical accounts is that Baseball was led by white men who all went to the same club with a bottomless private stock of of Patriarchy In A Can. Totes different from today. They just have Skinny Girl Petra-arcHER… In A Can.
Melissa Ludtke mentioned another difference in sports beats of the 1970s, and earlier, when she appeared on SportsLit to discuss her book Locker Room Talk: A Woman’s Struggle To Get Inside. Her point seemed to be was that baseball writers’ horizons were much more tunneled-in.
It’s a compassionate point — as a listener, I took Ludtke to mean, the baseball beat was the top reporter slot, but the opportunity cost is huge. It also cuts down one’s horizon.
Football has 10 per cent the number of games. They are either Saturday or Sunday. It leaves time for a sports-passionate writer who has broad horizons, and a devil’s playground of mind.
In the early 1960s, there are two football leagues. The new AFL offers opportunities for sportswriters that were not there a half-decade ago.
As a high-up person in sports media once put it, a league or a network can chase or defend — but not both. The NFL is defending, expecting it will never have to back up its proclamation of superiority. The AFL and writers who follow football intently have seen something else, and it is just a matter of when they can write it.
A ‘modern era’ debate
A good rile-’em-upper, or Casual Con, is to ask someone when they believe a major sport entered its modern era. For focus, this is when the public sees it all as legit.
Modern media shorthand uses the “Super Bowl era,” which began in 1966. Some others might pin the term to 1960, the first season of the AFL.
How about halfway between those seasons, when one of sportswriting’s great ones, Dan Jenkins, dared to say the best of the AFL could beat a top team from the NFL.
‘A Coming World Series AFL vs. NFL’ — S.I., Dec. 16, 1963; plus a bit of Buck and Sandy
Thinking about the “six teams” challenge brought up a stray memory of a Sports Illustrated cover.11 It is from the days when consumer mags plotted their covers weeks ahead to work within the color-printing tec. Often, it would be a ‘setup’ shot with the athletes. In loose context, it means S.I. plotted its Editorial Stand for several weeks.
Inside, Dan Jenkins (1928-2019), then a 35-year-old sportswriter, says the Sid Gillman-coached Chargers would have a chance “in a World Series game” against even Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers. The Packers entered the the ’63 season as two-time reigning champions.
The timing is unmistakable. The date on the cover, Dec. 16, is the day after the end of the NFL regular season. The AFL is pushed back a week due to postponing games after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It is meant to be read during a long football-less stretch: the Giants-Bears NFL title tilt in two weeks’ time, and the AFL’s game a week later.
This is a troll job extraordinaire.
Jenkins goes right for the solar plexus by pointing out the Packers had lost “to the College All-Stars” in the annual game where a thrown-together squad of NFL rookies would play last season’s champion. It was a contrivance that Lombardi hated.12 Jenkins lays it on thick, saying the NFL “displayed some human frailties to its business rival.”
He then works the body by pointing out the AFL was generally out-recruiting the NFL, so the Packers had not even lost to the best and brightest rookies. It is 1963, so it goes unmentioned the AFL is more accommodating and welcoming to Black athletes. It mentions it is much more willing to let their large linemen be large, since few coaches who believe iron-man, one-platoon football is coming back to the pro game.
In cherry-picked fact, one ’63 AFL rookie proves the new league is way ahead in modern ‘positional need’ draft strategy. Buck Buchanan, of Kansas City (né Dallas Texans), is at least a Quad-First in the history of drafts.
Till then, the No. 1 overall pick in a football draft was almost always a white passer or receiving-rushing threat from a power conference team, since they had name recoginish. For instance, Jim Brown lasted to the No. 6 overall choice in 1957!
Buchanan, though, is the first No. 1 overall pick who plays “defensive interior,” in today’s draftspeak. He is from Grambling St., an HBCU. He is listed at 6-foot-7, 270 pounds, so he was probably the largest No. 1 overall choice. And, sadly after the tragic too-soon death Ernie Davis, Buchanan is the first African-American to go No. 1 and get to reach his potential.
About 25 years later, Electronic Arts releases John Madden Football as a PC game. The default squads, with players limited to 10-character names, are chosen by John Madden. There are the ALL-TIMERS and ALL-MADDEN; the latter are “based on who John thought were the best players from the time he coached.” The ALL-MADDEN team has a defensive tackle give 86 and named BUCK.
So do you have something to throw in about Sandy Koufax?
The use of “World Series” reads as a Jenkins bank shot against baseball and its self-importance. Reading Jenkins’s best stuff, summers for him were for golf, not baseball.
In 1963, in overreaction to a jump in run-scoring due to expansion, Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick ordered a widened strike zone for the 1963 AL/NL competition. Jenkins is also a Texan, and one of his too-easy targets is New Yorkers and L.A.-types.
The World Series that year would have been hotly anticipated; the Yankees were facing the California-based Dodgers for the first time. Sandy Koufax had been too young for those Yankees-Brooklyn Dodgers series in the 1950s, so it was a true homecoming. Hype must have been off the rails.
Except… well, that Frick move meant it was a Dud. Or the start of a Dead Ball Era. The Dodgers, with Koufax dealing, swept the Yankees 4-0. They, without even producing many runs, led after 31 of the series’ 36 innings.13
How did that Jenkins article age?
Very well!! Thank you for letting me assume you were interested. The junior circuit is putting up numbers that intuit the era of fantasy football and RedZone era. First, please keep in mind this is a 14-team NFL, and eight-team AFL, just more than half of the size. Each played a 14-game schedule.
An AFL team scored an average of 23.14 points to the NFL’s 21.98 average.
The AFL had a higher ratio of 1,000-yard gainers (combo of receiving and rushing) to teams than the NFL (1.25 to 0.86). Jim Brown tallied about 450 more yards than anyone else. The runner-up was Raiders running back Clem Daniels, who was a 1,000-yard rusher who averaged more than 22½ yards per reception. Just wheel route, baby!
OK, the NFL, with Johnny Unitas, Y.A. Tittle, and Bart Starr, has eight quarterbacks who top 5.0 ‘adjusted net yards per pass.’14 Only three AFL QBs exceed top 5.0. This fancystat takes the average yards per attempt, adds a credit for each touchdown pass, and deducts for interceptions and sack yardage.15
Three NFL teams had a point differential (PD) greater than the Chargers’ AFL-leading plus-144. Six of the eight worst PDs were in the NFL.
All eight AFL teams scored at least 249 points; the fewest any team allowed was 255. Only eight points separated the top three teams in fewest points allowed.
The NFL had a sub-200 points scored team. It also had a team that allowed fewer than 150 points.
What happened next that made Dan Jenkins look smart?
Dec. 29, 1963: Bears 14, Giants 10 (NFL championship)
It was -12C in Chicago, none of the game’s three touchdown drives covered more than 45 yards, and hobbled Giants QB Y.A. Tittle threw five interceptions. It looked like Bad Football, and something out of the past.
Were the Football Fates mad about it? Eighteen seasons passed before the Bears or Giants team won a playoff game. The next time, the Giants won a wild-card game against the Eagles. A special teams touchdown helped build an early lead.
Who was one of the coaches handling special teams? You guessed it, Bill Belichick.
Also:
Jan. 5, 1964: Chargers 51, Patriots 10 (AFL championship)
A casual diehard with no rooting ties, who had read Jenkins’s piece, might have said, “OK, the AFL might have a team worthy of a game with the NFL.” There is not much to belabor with a 41-point margin. One must note the Chargers primary passer, Tobin Rote, was a Toronto Argonauts alumnus.
The Patriots were an 8-6-1 team that had to play a divisional playoff game, and getting from Boston to San Diego in early January was not too easy in 1964. Another unbeknown edge is, yeah, the 1963 Chargers were, uh, early adopters in Better Football Through Chemistry.
Glenn Stout mentioned it in his SportsLit appearance in 2018.
‘Six teams should make the playoffs’
The point of the scenic re-route through early-modern Baseball and Football history is to show one sport was thinking ahead. How do you build a playoff system that? Baseball, through a skein of less-than-visionary commissioners, is constantly taking rearguard actions.
Starting around mid-1960s, Football will continually come up with format revamps to the playoffs. Many are “nauseatingly cynical” as the Washington Post’s Thomas Boswell harrumphed some time in the 1980s. Baseball will trail behind, copy what the NFL did years earlier, and expect to be congratulated on its vision.
Hum or put on the Always Sunny bumper music. Something ASMR. Whatever Schlasser would do.
Football playoff formats vs. baseball playoff formats, not so briefly
1967: NFL/AFL have six teams in the postseason!
Think of any late-1960s, early-’70s period movie where there is the guy, who can code-switch between junior exec and stoner. He is trying to impress some ingénue, a young alumna of Sarah Lawrence College who opens him up to new worlds.
There is a non-zero chance that manboy-woman dynamic played into an NFL subdividing that created a six-team postseason. Expansion to 16 teams means four divisions of four. (The AFL still has a direct-final format.) Three division names are Capitol (only one team actually in a capital city), Central, and Century (that is not going to trip up anyone). There is also a Coastal, with teams some 4,000 km apart.
Predictably, the team that tied for the best record does not make the playoffs.
And baseball looks at that and says, We should try that!!
By then, Roger Angell was in his groove writing his New Yorker baseball essays. One hangs off the “Impossible Dream” 1967 Red Sox. It’s entitled, “The Flowering and Deflowering of New England,” and it warns major-league baseball against copying football. It is a dig-in against having a bad playoff system.
An 11-1-2 team missing the playoffs should have been enough to generate a rule that a division must have at least five teams. Our imagined straight-arrow guy never lived that one down, but at least he turned it into a Veronica Vaughn story about some 1960s counter-culture icon. Like in The Red Green Show when the bush pilot Buzz Sherwood claims he dated Grace Slick from Jefferson Airplane.
When all else fails, believe in Cope.
1969: Baseball expansion! Football wild cards!
Nineteen sixty-nine marked the first time more Americans said football was their fave sport compared to the number who picked baseball.
The basic theme is that leadership is cooked if they know they must change with the times but do not know how to do it. Pressure is a choice, and the AL/NL chose to expand by 20 percent in one shot in 1969, from 20 teams to 24. That will allow for pennant playoffs in each league.
Did the rushed expansion pay off?
Kansas City, Mo.: A replacement team. The Royals have four league pennants and two World Series titles. However, there was a span (1995-2012) of 17 losing seasons in 18.
Montréal, Qué.: Moments of great promise, but after 36 seasons and no full-season playoff berths, relocate to Washington, D.C., in 2005.
San Diego, Calif.: An upgraded Triple-A outfit. One of three teams from the ’69 and ’77 expansions yet to win a World Series title.
Seattle, Wash.: The Pilots after a single season, and became the Milwaukee Brewers. One league pennant. Once had 15 consecutive .500 or below seasons (1993-2007).
For auld lang syne, the AFL adopted cross-over divisional playoffs for its 10th and final season in 1969. There are wild-card teams, and Kansas City wins the Super Bowl from that slot.
The KC post-season run starts with shutting down the Joe Namath-quarterbacked Jets in the first round. Remember a few grafs ago, that mention of 5.0 adjusted net yards per pass being a measure of Adequate Queue-Being? Namath averages less than 0.5 in that loss and never starts another NFL playoff game.
Let’s just run through formats.
3 divisions, 1 wild card on each side of the sport!
NFL: 1970-77; MLB: 1994-2011
In Season 3½ of baseball’s wild-card era, interleague play is added. The fifth-year Florida Marlins play .544 baseball against NL teams, and the Mets play .551 ball. The Marlins’ interleague record vaults them into the playoffs, and they win the World Series.
Someone at 30 Rock, the NBC headquarters, might have bumped into Bob Costas and mentioned it to him. A few seasons later Costas authors Fair Ball: A Fan’s Case For Baseball. What does he not denounce? The imagery used by the final two teams the ’97 Marlins played, Cleveland and Atlanta.
3 divisions, 2 wild cards in a play-in game!
NFL: 1978-89; MLB: 2012-2019, ‘21
At least baseball is learning patience, like a young batter. It waits at least two decades before copying a discarded NFL format.
And, for TV purposes, how a fanbase feels about what a team did across the grind of 162 games will be determined by ‘best-of-1 series.’ By 2015, when the teams with the nos. 2 and 3 records are playing off, this will look dumb.
3 divisions, and 3 wild cards!
NFL: 1990-2001; MLB: 2022-present
In this baseball format, hypothetically, the same MLB team can host a wild-card series one year, and blow it against a non-divisional border rival. The next season, they go on the road as the No. 6 seed. They score one run in two games against a non-divisional border rival, but the fanbase is supposed to be roiled about the pitching usage.
Again, hypothetical.
4 divisions, and 2 wild cards!
NFL: 2002-19; MLB: inevitably!
This step involves an expansion to 32 teams. The NHL and Commissioner Gary Bettman scores one hear: Four divisions of eight is greater than eight divisions of four.
Of course, MLB wants to add two more teams to 32. It will happen, they say, once the Athletics and Rays are in new ballparks. No problem there! The Rays have their future stadium plan.
Right here, right now, there is no better use of at least US$730 million of the people’s money than subsidizing the construction of an MLB ballpark on the hurricane-vulnerable Gulf Coast.16 Spend it on climate adaptation?!
4 divisions, and 3 wild cards!
NFL: 2020-present; MLB: inevitably!
Under the cover of a pandemic, the NFL added another wild card spot. This allows for two prime-time games.
Keep the MLB playoffs to six teams … scenario-ing in on the goal.
The preceding highlighted that Baseball should have anticipated the Playoff Problem between 1961 and ’64. The multi-team races in 1964, and ’67, would have also led to fevered media scenarioring about three-, maybe four-team playoffs!
The four-divisions, pennant-playoff era began in 1969.
That ingénue? There was another ingénue! History might say they were roommates. One morning in the summer of ’69, she tells another Darren Straight-Arrow type, who has just been hired in the MLB offices: You are just starting out… baseball is slow to change. Just count how many times a division winner has the same or fewer wins than a team in the other division, for at least 10 years.
— Why 10 years? Darren asks. He counts on his hands. It will be 1978 by then. He asks her to explain the timeline, but this French-lit grad has hopped up to brush her teeth — brosse les dents.
At their next lunch date, she explains, more slowly this time, that Baseball always needs proof of a bad design concept. At least 10 years. Et brosse-toi les dents, she adds. She then tells them she has decided to move home to Kansas City, or was it central Canada, to become one of North America’s first lefthanded women dentists.
1969 to ’78: Bucky of evidence
There are seasons where the four-division era works well, and the AL East, AL West, NL East, and NL West all have a stellar mini-pennant winner. By 1978, nine no-playoff teams tie or exceed the wins tally of a mini-pennant winner from the other side of their league, tro mig.
Who is the ninth? CUT TO: Fenway Park, Oct. 2, 1978
Ah, the AL East playoff between the Red Sox and Yankees. They tied for the best overall record with 99 wins. The Kansas City Royals, a 92-win team, will host the lid-lifter of the pennant playoff the next night despite an inferior wins-losses record.17
For six innings and a bit, the Yankees appear to be the almost-awesome also-ran. Two on, two out, in the seventh, and it’s 9-hitter shortstop Bucky Dent up with four home runs all season.
And Boom went the Dentamite.
On the commuter rail home, drowsy after the adrenalin of a do-or-done ballgame and the flask he had brought, Dude remembers him what Whatshername told him that sweet morning in 1969 Manhattan… Brosse-toi les dents … Bucky Dent!
Is his life ruined? It is merely a train of thought that keeps the Dude up the odd night. Besides, he is still down on the depth chart of the Kuhnian Chorus of yes-men, and suggesting the wrong thing on the wrong day is just not done.
So, yes, the Sixties really did end one day in 1978.
This is also a time when Baseball, institutionally, is doing a lot of fight-pickin’. Players’ association head Marvin Miller and the unionized baseball workforce (at least at the major-league level) keep beating them in negotiations. Make of it what you will that Kuhn’s office, unable to keep the ballplayers in servitude, seems to pick a lot of fights… and loses those, too.
Observe:
Crisitunity: 1979-81
To close out the decade, the East-based Brewers, Expos, Red Sox, and Yankees all tally more wins than the pertinent West champ.18
Similar dealio in 1980. The 100-win Orioles are left out. The Astros and Dodgers tie for the NL’s best record, but the East-pacing Phillies are waved into the playoffs first.
Then comes the 1981 strike season, when MLB used a split-season format. The Cincinnati Reds had the best overall record and did not win either share of the NL West. The St. Louis Cardinals had the best overall record in the NL East and also missed the special playoff.19
Darren Straight-Arrow, by then is an OG Girl Dad. His eldest two daughters wonder why a 91-win team is waved in while 92-win teams have a do-or-done playoff game. And they have an electric typewriter, so they can type out a fairly simple plan. It is just a matter of when they hand it to the players’ association and the promoters.
A run-off playoff with up to four teams is scheduled if one division champion has a weaker record than an otherwise non-playoff team in the same league. They can still put up a mini-pennant for what they did in the ‘first 162,’ but they are going to have to earn the league championship series (LCS) berth.
A two-team play-in should be multiple games. Two-games total-runs format suit everyone? Play a doubleheader. Or do a best-of-3 with a doubleheader, a format that’s popular in college baseball.
Should the first-place team host, or the team who tallied more wins? Neither! The team with more wins must pick a neutral site up to MLB codes. All ticketing is general admission. Make it like a School Day games that originated in pro-format hockey in the early ’00s.
Three teams? Double round-robin, everyone plays each other twice. Tiebreaker game if necessary.
Four teams? Single round-robin, with six games over four days.
The LCS opponent can avoid rust by dusting off an old-timey custom. League pennant-winning team used to schedule exhibition games. A few conference calls could arrange some interleague exhibition games.
They also quote George Carlin. Baseball has no time limit. We do not know when it is going to end!
Are we ready to see how this could have been before Commissioner Bud Selig, et al., just had to go to three divisions in 1994?
1984
Suspect! AL West, Royals (.519). Wild cards: Blue Jays (.549), Yankees (.537), Red Sox (.531) Format: 4-team round-robin.
Site: Riverfront Stadium, Cincinnati, Oct. 1-4. LCS fave lying in wait: Detroit Tigers (.642).
The Blue Jays and Royals are probably best suited for the gameplay in concrete-donut stadiums. Toronto is a playoff first-timer, and perhaps the George Brett-led Royals find the same fire they did in the 1985 pennant playoff. Their pitching is not as deep, though.
Either way, the Yankees’ Don Mattingly and Dave Winfield play post-season games together. The Red Sox would seem to be at the largest disadvantage playing on the Cincinnati turf.
’85
Suspect 1A! AL West, Royals (.562). Wild card: Yankees (.602).
Format: multigame matchup.
Site: Shea Stadium, NYC, Oct. 8-9. LCS fave awaiting: Blue Jays (.615).
An old rivalry gets renewed. Brett (may still be on) a mission to bring KC a World Series champion.
The Jays took the AL East flag by winning four of the last six meaningful tilts against the Yankees in September. The Yankees are a better LCS matchup for them than the Royals.
Suspect 1B! NL West, Dodgers (.585). Wild card: Mets (.605).
Format: multigame matchup.
Site: Wrigley Field, Chicago, Oct. 8-9. LCS fave awaiting: Cardinals (.615).
The Mets had romped in their season series against the Cubs in 1985. The lack of lights also means the Dodgers are two time zones ahead of their body clock. The intense Mets-Cardinals rivalry is now on national TV for six or seven nights.
’87
Suspect 1A! AL West, Twins (.525). Wild cards: Blue Jays (.593), Brewers (.562), Yankees (.549).
Format: 4-team round-robin.
Site: Comiskey Park, Chicago, Oct. 5-8. LCS fave awaiting: Tigers (.605).
The Blue Jays went 5-1 at Old Comiskey in ’87, and the site selection makes the Twins out of their dome-sweet-dome. Minnesota played .338 baseball under open skies during their World Series season. In mid-September, the Twins were swept there and outscored 27-14 against a mediocre White Sox team.
In this scenario, though, the Brewers and Yankees have fuller lineups. The Blue Jays had lost shortstop Tony Fernández and catcher Ernie Whitt.
Suspect 1B! NL West, Giants (.556). Wild cards: Mets (.568), Expos (.562).
Format: 3-team double round-robin.
Site: Wrigley Field, Chicago, Oct. 5-8. LCS fave awaiting: Cardinals (.586).
So Tim Raines and the Expos play postseason games at Wrigley after Andre Dawson showed up at the Cubs’ ’87 spring training with that blank contract? It is only awkward if we see it as awkward.
Bringing the San Francisco Giants to Chicago in October tempts a backfire. In the ’87 pennant playoff, Giants mid-order outfielder Jeffrey Leonard homered in four games in a row. And now he might have favorable tater winds in Chitown.
’88
Suspect! AL East, Red Sox (.549). Wild card: Twins (.562).
Format: multigame matchup.
Site: Anaheim Stadium, Anaheim, Calif., Oct. 3-5. LCS fave awaiting: Athletics (.615).
The Twins of Kirby Puckett, Kent Hrbek, and Frank Viola, played guilty on the road in 1988. They improved to .541 (40-34) in the great outdoors. A Red Sox-Twins special playoff would have been lit.
In this timeline, the Red Sox’ are still regrouping from the 1986 World Series. They have a new manager, Joe Morgan, and new central figures who don’t have the whiff of Buckner on ’em. Ellis Burks and Jody Reed have lifted the 2468 Kite.
Lefty-hitting Mike (Gator) Greenwell is the MVP runner-up to a 40/40 man José Canseco. Wade Boggs onboarded a career-most .476 to win the true batting title. Future hall of famer Lee Smith is the closer.
The Twins closed out the regular season at home. The Red Sox had a series at Cleveland. That means the “Wade Boggs Drank ____ Beers On A Cross-Country Flight” meme is in play. Have him so wobbly-popped that his on-base percentage drops down to .400.
There are domes in Houston or Seattle. However, the Twins are going for a power move, and to remove any doubt. Perhaps Bert Blyleven gets hot in the California sun ahead of his actual comeback year in ’89, and he gets into Cooperstown much sooner.20
’89
Suspect! AL East, Blue Jays (.549). Wild cards: Royals (.568), Angels (.562).
Format: 3-team double round-robin.
Site: Arlington Stadium, DFW, TX, Oct. 2-5. LCS fave awaiting: Athletics (.611).
The Bo Jackson gets to appear in the postseason before his hip injury in football, so there is that. And, as a Blue Jays fan who lives among the Buffalo Bills Mafia, one must flip a table on their selfs.
In 1989, Bo Jackson hit five home runs in 22 at-bats at the dinky Texas Rangers home ballpark. Jackson also waited out five bases on balls for a small-sample OPS of in the 1.500 range.21 That might not even be the best reason to play some ‘fall ball’ in Dallas.
Also, Dallas in 1989 is a trolling goldmine waiting to happen. The Cowboys are on their way 1-15. The SMU Mustangs are starting from zero after the two-year NCAA death penalty.
Royals marketing and promotions has contacts with every Big 8 or Southwest Conference school whose football team is on NCAA probation, and whose baseball team has a tight-knit loyal fanbase. There are many! Work the phones, and pack in the hecklers behind first and third base. The Jays’ four corners might all have rabbit ears:
First base, Fred McGriff, future hall of famer, the league home run champion, but he has tailed off badly since Sept. 1;
Third base, Kelly Gruber, native of Texas, and as Stephen Brunt would later write, “Known as ‘Foggy’ because he often didn’t seem fully engaged with the cosmos”;
Left field, George Bell, a crash-and-bang hockey winger in the body of a Dominican cleanup hitter, and a generation of Canadians love him to this day for it;
Right field, the Jays’ are switching off 21-year-old Junior Félix, who has all the tools but no toolbox, and trade deadline add Mookie Wilson, a lovely man whose outfielder’s arm was destroyed by a coach one soggy morning in Florida years earlier.22
How to rattle the Angels. These are football fans. As long as they are respectful to Jim Abbott about him being one-handed, it is cool.
And that is what would have been fun. Psych-job sportsfare, within the bounds of keeping everyone safe. Having a diversity in ballpark builds to try to play to the strengths of a team, or get in the heads of another.
There are four more seasons (1990-93) of the four-division era, but I believe in knowing what you need, and when you have it. This was fun to write.
Conclusion
INT. DAY — A Chicago condo, circa 2011-13
Dave Rose (Zachary Knighton) has finished sharing his charts, graphs, and marshaled arguments about why Major League Baseball needs an easier-to-follow playoff system. Of course, Dave is going to Dave, and about a quarter of the way through he stopped remembering to connect
DAVE
(turning)
‘The point was long but evident: all playoff formats are arbitrary, but the better ones are fun and interactive. Top seeds picking their opponent, picking a neutral-site ballpark. It beats what there is now—’
And, as so often happens when one of the Happy Endings gang goes on a long rant, four-fifths of this early 2010s hangout sitcom sixsome are out of sight. The only one of the group remaining is Dave’s one-time fiancée, Alex Kerkovich (Elisha Cuthbert), and sitting next to her is an intense-looking hockey-player type.
DAVE
‘Alex! So glad you stayed. What did you think?’
ALEX
It was great! Oh, I can’t lie to you, though, Dave. Jane made me stay to make sure you would not break her old-timey slide projector.
DAVE
That certainly tracks. But it looks like we gained somebody…
ALEX
(throwing one arm around the man, who has not moved or blinked, and rubbing his leg with his free hand.)
‘Yes, Dave, Zach, whoever, meet my husband — Dion Phaneuf.’
DION PHANEUF
‘Hey, man. I actually really thought that insightful.’
DAVE
‘Alex — husband?’
ALEX
‘Yes, “Dave” or should I say Zach Knighton? Our show was cancelled almost 12 years ago but has a weirdly cultish shelf life. My actual name is Elisha Cuthbert, this is my husband who is a famous, well, Canada-famous retired National Hockey League player.’
DAVE / ZACH & DION
‘Canada-famous?’
ALEX / ELISHA
‘Babe, tell him how I got you to agree to ‘Canada-famous.’
DION
‘She put it in the prenup, then put it into a stack of memorabilia I was signing. Veteran move. You just gotta tip your cap. It was diabolical.’
ELISHA & DION
(clinching)
— Dionabolical!
ALEX / ELISHA
Just one thing, Dave-Zach. If we are in some timeline where the present day and the TV shows an actor has been in all commingle… and you went on an awfully long time about WILD CARDS in sports, and—
DAVE
‘So? Oh, right—’
This is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind — especially to yourself.
Oct. 9-10, 2024
Loyalist Twp.-Storms Corners, Ont. : ancestral lands of the Haudenosaunee, Michi Saagiig, and Omámíwinini Peoples.
Martin J. Greenberg, “Roster Depreciation Allowance,” Sportsbiz, Feb. 14, 2015. Going off where I read this out of a library book, Veeck came up with this when he was the sole proprietor of the Cleveland AL team in the late 1940s. That, of course, was Larry Doby, Satchel Paige, Luke Easter, and others who broke the racist line in the American League.
Coming up with RDA, of course, did not endear Veeck to anyone. He only had the Cleveland team a short while, then gained controlling interest of the St. Louis Browns. At that time, the AL’s Browns and NL’s Cardinals were in a Loser Leaves Town match. Veeck was shot down when he (a) suggested local television revenue be shared among all teams, since the Yankees had most of it, and (b) to let him move the Browns to Los Angeles, taking the AL and NL to the West Coast. They waited him out, and the Browns became the Baltimore Orioles.
On item (a), disparities in local/regional revenue are still a Problem in MLB 7¼ decades later. On (b) the Dodgers, Giants, and the NL re-settled in the West Coast first
The term racist line, rather than the both-sidesy ‘color line,’ should be credited to Russell A. Carleton, author of The New Ballgame.
Michael Wilbon, “Owning Up to the Truth: Cooke Was the Best,” Washington Post, Apr. 8, 1997.
From 1960 till ’62, Dallas was a two-football-teams town. A good account of that is John Eisenberg’s Ten-Gallon War: The NFL’s Cowboys, the AFL’s Texans, and the Feud for Dallas’s Pro Football Future (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). The Texans moved to Kansas City in 1963.
Alternate timeline post for another day: since I am a Minnesota Vikings fan, what happens if they come to life as a charter AFL team in 1960, instead of as an NFL expansion team in ’61? Well, if you read the autobiography of the greatest Vikings coach, Bud Grant, you know he turned down the chance to be the Vikings’ first head coach in ’61 and stayed with the Canadian league’s Winnipeg Blue Bombers. His rationale, decades later, was that coaching an expansion team is a thankless job. A start-up team, with trustworthy employers, might have been different.
The Raiders. You already knew it would be the Raiders.
High-lev situs equals high-leverage situations, as abbreviated by Penny Hartz (Casey Wilson).
Et vous, monsieur Sager? Beaucoup de projet, eh?
In the ’62 National League season, the Dodgers and Giants tied at 101-61. Under NL rules, a best-of-3 pennant playoff was grafted on to the regular season. The Giants took 2-of-3.
Dan Jenkins, “The AFL Could Win The World Series,” Dec. 16, 1963.
Sourced from: David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi, Simon and Schuster, 1999.
Have some fun looking at the stats. The Yankees onboarded only 27 runners and scored only four runs in the four-game sweep; they had a .207 OBP with five extra-base hits. The kicker is the Dodgers didn’t even hit that much.
All the stats are from Pro-Football-Reference, understandably.
Ibid., but for the 1963 AFL competition.
Pinellas County, Fla., has committed $312.5 mil, while St. Petersburg, Fla., is promising $417.5 mil for the Rays’ 30,000-seat stadium. Source: “Florida county approves deal to build a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium,” Associated Press, July 30, 2024.
1978 ALCS, Baseball-Reference.com.
1979 Major League standings, Baseball-Reference.com.
1981 Major League standings, Baseball-Reference.com.
Bert Blyleven, Baseball-Reference.com.
Bo Jackson 1989 splits, Baseball-Reference.com.
See Jeff Pearlman, The Bad Guys Won.