OT: MLB wild card playoff moving to 2-3 format
"Baseball's owners have approved changing the format of this year's AL and NL Division Series from a 2-2-1 format to a 2-3 format, giving the team with home-field advantage the last three games of the five-game series."
Home-field advantage doesn't seem like much of an advantage anymore.
http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/7942366/owners-approve-wild-card-winn…
Anything you do to make your league more like the WNBA is questionable at best.
What or who is the WNBA?
#hatelayups
Don Imus will fill you in...
Yikes.
I think any way to do a 5 game series is tough. 1-1-1 at the end means a ton of travel, and a 2-3 means there is a reasonable chance the better team comes back needing to win all three- but if you truly are better you should at least split the first two and have a hge advantage wrapping the series up. It also guarantees the lower seed needs to win on the road- which is tough to do.
Why do you need to do 1-1-1?
Right now it's 2-2-1.
What about a 1-2-2?
Or how about a 1-1-1-1-1?
"Play all five games at the Rose Bowl."
When exactly did the concept that a one game home field advantadge was all any team could be given; regardless of the length of regular season or playoff series get written in stone? It always seemed to me that if you really wanted to make the regular season meaningful give the team with the home field advantadge two additional games instead of one. In a five game series you could go 1-1-3 (thereby ensuring at least one game at each park) and in a seven game series you could go 2-2-3.
Leagues like the NHL, NBA and MLB always talk about how they want the regular season to mean something but they don't do much to honor it. The NFL, on the other hand, truly puts some teeth in it (you are either home or not - one game) and, IMO, makes their regular season the most meaningful of all the major sports.
I would assume it is to help even the ticket sales between the road and home teams throughout the course of the series. If a team made the playoffs and played entirely on the road, they pay their players a large bonus for making the playoffs, but don't get additional ticket/tv income.
regular season scoring has made the playoff race incredibly exciting. The importance of regular season games has gone up considerably since the shootout points change. That's a change that did them good. Also awarding a top 3 seed to the division winners and home ice is a reward for a great season.
The problem, and its the same in the NFL, is that the big prize is the biggest prize everyone wants, The Stanley Cup. No one gives sh*t about winning the President's Trophy or the Division Championship. It's all about the Cup.
I've had this debate more than a few times, and I really dislike the playoff structure in the NHL and NBA where the regular season means jack shit.
But there is also a question of fairness vs. entertainment. When the champion is seemingly totally random, is this unfair or more entertaining? Personally, I find the MLB system to be unfair. Judge a team over 162 games, then dump them in 5 close-to-coin-flip-probability games. But on the other hand, I love the randomness of the NCAA basketball tournament. So there is a tradeoff. For me, the right tradeoff is NFL or college football, where regular season games matter a ton, and there is still some playoffs that heavily favor good regular season teams. I also would be fine the with European soccer model of no playoffs, but as stated earlier, Americans would never go for this.
It's mathematically impossible in a best of 3, 5, or 7 series for one team to have 2 more home games than the other team.
Sorry nothing is impossible. Especially for people involved in setting up playoffs (See the logic in the Big 10 saying that home playoff games aren't needed in the possible Football Playoff)
Other than being mathamatically impossible though it was a pretty god-damn good idea though you have to admidt.
Stupid math.
The NFL has an absurd precentage of its teams make the playoffs, then has the most highly variable format (single-elimination) of any pro league. It does, by far, the least to make its regular season meaningful, as indicated by the number of asinine, barely-above-.500 champions we've seen in the last 5 years.
The NFL only has 37.5% (12/32) make the playoffs, while the NHL and NBA both have 53.3% (16/30) teams make the playoffs? In comparison, there is actually a huge difference. It just so happened that in the last couple of NFL seasons, there has just been a couple of shitty divisions, which has to send one of its' barely .500 (or even less) teams to the playoffs as the division winner.
I think the NBA and NHL's precentages are nutso as well, but they are somewhat mitigated by a best-of-seven format. If you went to single-elimination in the NBA, we'd see a sub-.500 champion within a decade, I'd bet.
one travel day, and probably will allow the playoffs to move along quicker by a day or two. Not a bad move.
Last at bat, 3 games straight seems like a decent reward for the "higher" seed.
This was the format for the playoffs from 1995 - 1997. IIRC, there was some complaining about the lower seeded team having the advantage of playing the first 2 games at home so they changed to a 2-2-1 format.
This is the way it was done when the leagues were divided into east and west and the championship series were 5 games.
If they want to do a 2-3, they should do a doubleheader. Ticket sales would probably do great if they had a morning game, then a night game. It should be done on a Saturday or Sunday, and bring a lot of excitement. The players would hate this though.