MLB’s expanded playoffs not fun for baseball’s regular-season superpowers

If you’re the kind of sports fan who lives for amazing upsets, for out-of-nowhere underdogs, for regular-season monsters being slain by a couple of unlucky bounces, this is a great week, isn’t it?

Yep, the Major League Baseball season begins on Thursday, which means we’re only six months and 162 games away from that sort of didn’t-see-that-coming championship tournament.

“If you make the playoffs, you have a chance to win it all,” MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said of his sport’s NCAA tournament-like embrace of Cinderella stories since expanding the postseason to 12 teams two years ago. “My own view is that the format works pretty well.”

Manfred is clearly not a Dodgers or Braves fan, because those two teams have discovered rather painfully the past two Octobers how little regular-season dominance matters once you reduce your season to best-of-five.

Atlanta has routed Philadelphia in the NL East in two consecutive years, winning more than 100 games and finishing a whopping 14 games ahead both times. But the Phillies eliminated the Braves 3-1 in back-to-back years.

Same goes for the Dodgers, winners of 111 games in 2022 and 100 last summer — and one game, total, in the playoffs. The Padres, 22 games worse, beat L.A. 3-1 two years ago, and the Diamondbacks, 16 games behind, swept the Dodgers 3-0 last October en route to the World Series.

In fact, of the 11 playoff series in baseball’s 2023 tournament, the team with the better record won only three times (one series matched identical records); those teams combined to go 13-21, and the World Series champion was a wild-card team — the Texas Rangers, who with three weeks to go, found themselves completely out of a playoff spot.

“They scuffled down the stretch and lost a bunch of games, but we thought it was a better team than its record,” said Derek Falvey, the Twins’ president of baseball operations. “Even good teams go through bad stretches, but if you can get into the postseason and peak at the right time, no one will care about your win total.”

Falvey, of course, must navigate this new reality as he builds the Twins’ roster each offseason. And the upset-ridden playoffs have raised fundamental questions about how to do so: Is it worth trying to squeeze every victory out of the long regular season? Or is it enough to merely qualify for October and game plan for short series?

“We don’t look at it that way. Our view is, put your team in the best position to be successful through the course of the year, however it shakes out,” Falvey said. “I don’t think we’ve ever targeted a specific win number. Our goal, our first-order goal, is to win the division. We don’t think, how can we get a wild card? We start with, let’s go win the Central, and then obviously you want to win beyond there. But we’re trying to win as many games as we can.”

For one thing, finishing with one of the top two records in each league allows a team to avoid the best-of-three wild-card round, in which the outcome is essentially random; the team with the better record has lost six of the eight first-round series thus far. “That’s real value, avoiding that round,” Falvey said. “Those top two seeds are obviously worth pursuing.”

Maybe so, but it doesn’t take much investigation to learn that piling up regular-season wins matters little in the postseason. Twelve teams since 2019 have won 100 games; only three advanced even to the league championship series. And in the 28 full seasons since the MLB admitted non-division champions into the playoffs in 1995, the team with MLB’s best record has won the World Series only six times — two fewer than wild-card teams.

For that matter, payroll hasn’t directly correlated with winning, either. In the last decade, only the 2018 Red Sox have won a World Series with baseball’s highest payroll in a full season, and the 2017 Dodgers are the only other top-three highest-paid team to reach the championship round.

“We’re seeing that the two [schedules] reward different things,” Falvey said. “You’re focused a lot more on depth for the season-long marathon, when you might use 18 to 22 pitchers. But in short series, that depth doesn’t matter. Quality, or even who gets hot at the right time, matters a lot more.”

So what is a roster-builder to do, if winning a World Series for the first time since 1991 is the Twins’ goal?

“We talk about what it takes to win in the postseason a lot, I think most teams do. It’s no secret — power matters in the postseason, and it has for a long time,” said Falvey, who twice in the past four full seasons has fielded the American League’s leading home run-hitting team. He frequently points out that 10 of 11 series last October were won by the team that hit more home runs.

“Hit home runs and line up some premium arms to shorten games,” he said. “You have to build your team on both tracks, to succeed in-season, and then have the weapons to win beyond that.”

That’s why the Twins have looked to add power each offseason — Nelson Cruz, Josh Donaldson, Gary Sánchez, Joey Gallo, Carlos Santana just in the past five years, to varying success — and have targeted hard-throwing relievers more recently. Justin Topa, Daniel Duarte and Josh Staumont are this year’s mid- to high-90s throwing candidates who will join Jhoan Duran, Griffin Jax and Brock Stewart in the Twins’ bullpen.

The biggest change that playoff expansion has triggered, Falvey said, is probably felt most acutely in late July, just before the trade deadline.

“The extra wild card means that not every playoff team will have 90 wins, which maybe gives you more hope if the first half hasn’t gone the way you envisioned,” Falvey said. “You might say, hey, if we can get to 86 or 87, that might sneak us in. The Diamondbacks last year [84-78 but NL champions] were a great example. They traded for a closer [Paul Sewald from the Mariners] and it made a big difference.”

The first two seasons of the 12-team playoffs have been October Madness for baseball, but it’s obviously a small sample. Perhaps 100-win teams will assert themselves more forcefully going forward. But the playoff field figures to get larger in the coming years, not smaller. Manfred has made it known that MLB will ask for a 14-team playoff, in order to increase television revenue, in the next collectively bargained contract with the players union.

“If the die was cast — meaning that if I win 100 in the regular season, I’m going to win the World Series,” the commissioner said, “I don’t think that’s as interesting as what we witnessed” last October.