MLB should tweak Division Series format to make it fairer for top seeds

CLEVELAND — Baseball had a memorable day and night Saturday, an NCAA Tournament kind of day and night. For a sport often criticized for its glacial pace and lack of ball-in-play action, it sure did produce an awful lot of thrilling sudden-death scenes from one end of the country to the other.

In Philadelphia, the 87-win Phillies upset the 101-win Braves in four. In Seattle, the Astros homered in the 18th inning to break a scoreless tie, survive a marathon, and sweep the Mariners. In Cleveland, the offensively challenged Guardians scored three Game 3 runs in the ninth to land the mighty Yankees on the doorstep of disaster. In San Diego, the 89-win Padres used a five-run seventh to stun the 111-win Dodgers in one of the most devastating upsets in modern baseball history.

The toppling of the mighty Dodgers and the defending-champion Braves each had the feel of a mid-major knocking out a college basketball heavyweight. It wasn’t quite Saint Peter’s beating Kentucky on the way to the Elite Eight, but close enough.

“Shock factor, very high,” said Dodgers manager Dave Roberts. “Disappointment, very high. It’s crushing.”

And it all sounds like a marketing executive’s dream. You want fans to believe that anything is possible in sports, especially in the playoffs, where seasons are ruined and legends are made. Everyone loves an underdog after all, except for the people aligned with the overdogs.

But as entertaining an advertisement as Saturday was for MLB, it also exposed a flaw in its postseason program that needs to be fixed. The best-of-five division series should not be a best-of-five division series. It should be a best-of-seven division series in the name of fairness to the top tournament seeds.

The NHL plays best-of-seven in every postseason round, and after the play-in tournament is complete, the NBA does the same. Those leagues revolve around 82-game regular seasons, roughly half the length of baseball’s regular season.

The Dodgers were dominant over 162 games, taking the National League West by a 22-game spread over San Diego. Their reward was an atypical five-day layoff followed by a shorter division series shootout that favored the nothing-to-lose Padres, who went 5-14 against the Dodgers during the regular season.

A best-of-seven would’ve given Dodgers a greater margin for error, which they had earned through their performance over six months. Conventional thinking has it that the longer a series goes, the more likely it is that the stronger team will prevail.

You’re not so sure about that? Consider what San Diego’s local boy-made-good, Joe Musgrove, told Fox during the Padres’ wild clubhouse celebration:

“We got beat up on pretty good by these guys this year, and as a kid growing up I sat in those stands and I watched us get beat up by those guys for years. So to be able to knock them off in this round — it’s probably better that we had to face them in a five-game series than a seven. But you’re seeing this team starting to find its identity and really turn it on here down the stretch.”

“It’s probably better that we had to face them in a five-game series than a seven.”

Musgrove understands that it’s much easier to apply pressure to the high seeds when elimination is lurking around the bend.

But if anything, the postseason should be tilted in favor of the division champs, and not the wild cards. Maybe nothing changes this year if the division series was played over seven games instead of five. Maybe the Phillies still take out the Braves. Maybe the Padres still take out the Dodgers. Maybe the Guardians would have still arrived at Progressive Field on Sunday night with a chance to take out the Yanks.

“Because this is a new format, at the end of all this, everyone is going to analyze it and probably frankly overanalyze it some,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said before Game 4. “I think you have to do it for years to really get a real firm grasp on it. There’s nothing for us that’s been, you know, like we shouldn’t be able to be successful.”

That doesn’t mean the system shouldn’t be altered. If a dominant regular-season team is saddled with a long October layoff because MLB wanted to expand the wild-card round (and expand TV revenues), leaving it rusty and vulnerable to a lesser opponent with momentum, then the least MLB should do is give that dominant team some room to recover in the division series.

Of course, the easier solution here is for the Dodgers, Braves, and (through three games) the Yankees to play better. Nobody told their hitters to stop hitting, and their pitchers to start hanging sliders. There is no known rule stating that the knocked-out members of the 100-win club couldn’t do what the 106-win Astros did — show remarkable fortitude with their Game 1 resilience and their Game 3 durability.

The Astros managed the pressure in advancing to the ALCS for the sixth straight year. As it turns out, they know how to win big games even when they’re not running a scam.

But this isn’t about comparing one division champ’s mettle, or lack thereof, to Houston’s. This is about devising a system that gives the sport its best odds of identifying its best team. And a best-of-seven division series is that system.