It’s day 13 of the lockout, and it’s like we’re living under the dome from the Simpson’s Movie. It’s quite depressing to be honest.
We know things can’t pick up again until a new CBA is agreed upon. We also know that one of the topics discussed between the owners and the players was an expanded postseason field. The owners wanted 14 teams in the postseason, seven per league with a best of three Wild Card round where the second and third seeds select their Wild Card opponent, and the unpicked team goes to the fourth seed team.
The players voted it down, citing that it gave teams less of an incentive to be active at trade deadlines and in the offseason. They countered with a 12-team proposal, where the existing divisions were scrapped and realigned into two divisions per league. That’s also likely to be a non-starter for the owners.
Most likely, we’ll see the divisions stay the same and the postseason be expanded to 12 teams. That would mean three division winners and three Wild Card teams. In the American League, that team would have been the Blue Jays if this format was in place. In the National League, it would’ve been the Reds.
So what will it look like? Obviously each league adds one extra postseason team. We can surmise that the third seed will play the sixth seed and the fourth will match up with the fifth, as they currently do in the 10-team format. The proposals for expanded playoffs have included making the Wild Card round a best-of-three series, with the higher seed hosting all three games in a three day period, so we can imagine that it would probably come to that if agreed upon. Then again, they could just keep it at one game.
Obviously, with 6 teams per league in the playoffs, the top two division winners would get first round byes, like the NFL had been doing until they expanded their playoff format to 14 teams. I think this is probably what they’ll eventually agree on when the lockout is settled, along with all the nitty gritty financial pieces. It doesn’t allow too many teams to reach the postseason, and isn’t that significant of a step up as it would be to have 14 teams, or 16, like there were during the shortened 2020 campaign. It doesn’t undermine the long haul of a 162 game season either.
It’s going to be a while before this all gets hammered out, but expect this to be one of the things that’s agreed upon once the lockout reaches its end.
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