The Major League Baseball playoffs kick off today and two unlucky teams will find themselves two losses away from the golf course by day’s end.
For a sport that features a 162-game season that consists of mostly three-game series, to decide someone’s playoff fate in only five games makes no sense.
The NHL and NBA play seven-game first round series and they only play 82 regular season games in which teams play just once at a time.
The NBA rarely features first round upsets but moved from a five-game series to seven for the 2002-03 season.
After six months of fighting tooth-and-nail, if an MLB team loses Game 1 of the divisional round, they have to win three out of four games to advance.
Why play such a long season to make reaching the League Championship Series a crapshoot?
These guys have been playing for more than seven months and now a couple of fluke plays can send them home early. In a short series, absorbing a couple of early losses is almost impossible.
A longer series not only provides more drama but also gives a team a better chance to collect themselves and dig out of an early hole. This can be the indication of the best teams.
The championship-caliber teams bury an opponent when they get the sizable lead or find a way to battle back from the early deficit.
A short series can really eliminate the opportunity for the latter and makes the team that drops the first game or two really press and they can feel like they are out of it before they even got a chance to start.
Although the baseball season is already long this would add only two games at the most, going from 19 to 21 games maximum, and baseball still has one fewer round than the NBA or NHL.
Further, no additional travel would be necessary in a 2-3-2 format and it would only add two to three days to the playoff schedule.
The postseason is predicated on strong starting pitching and with only five games, the team’s best pitcher only throws twice and he may be the only one.
Scoring in baseball is limited for the most part in the playoffs so a longer series is necessary to really decide the stronger team.
While one team can eek out a few 3-2 wins, the pendulum can easily swing the other way in a longer series.
Baseball also allows the fewest teams into the postseason so there is no reason to further limit the opportunity.
The NHL and NBA let a whopping 16 teams into the playoffs, while the NFL includes 12.
Baseball is by far the most selective of the group, allowing only eight teams into the postseason each year.
Teams go decades between making the cut so to make their chance of advancing such a toss up is a disservice to their fans and to the integrity of the game.
Baseball’s famous seventh-inning stretch song “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” says, “It’s one, two, three strikes your out,” but let’s leave that determination up to the umpires and not the first round, where so much is on the line and the best teams can find their way out too quickly.
Tucker Savoye is a former Daily 49er staff writer. Stay tuned for weekly installments of “Tucker Talks.”