Major League Baseball’s expanded postseason has created plenty of excitement, but Matt Snyder believes the current format has gone too far. His biggest concern is simple: a team that finishes the 162-game regular season below .500 should not have a legitimate path to the World Series.
The issue became especially glaring in the American League standings. If the season had ended Monday, the Houston Astros and Texas Rangers would have both entered the postseason despite sitting at 65-66. Houston held the tiebreaker over Texas after winning nine of their 13 head-to-head meetings, while Texas also owned the tiebreaker over Cleveland.
That would have resulted in two teams with losing records occupying AL playoff spots, with the Astros and Rangers potentially meeting in the Wild Card round. Even worse, the winner of that matchup would then advance to the Division Series despite failing to win more games than it lost during the regular season.
For Snyder, that is difficult to justify.
Baseball already gives teams 162 games to establish whether they are good enough for October. Unlike shorter regular seasons in other sports, MLB provides an enormous sample size, making it difficult to argue that a team finishing below .500 simply had bad luck.
Snyder’s solution is straightforward: set a minimum win requirement for postseason qualification. A team would need at least 81 wins to remain eligible, although requiring 82 victories to guarantee a winning record would be another option.
The bigger question, however, is what happens to the playoff spots left vacant by teams that fail to meet the standard.
Option 1: Bring in the next-best teams
One possibility would be to replace disqualified teams with the best remaining clubs, regardless of league.
Using Monday’s standings as an example, Houston, Texas and Cleveland would be removed from the American League field. That would leave teams such as Tampa Bay, Chicago, New York and Boston among the eligible AL contenders.
Instead of handing postseason spots to losing teams, MLB could then look across the National League for teams with winning records that narrowly missed the cut. In this scenario, the Arizona Diamondbacks and Miami Marlins could be rewarded with postseason opportunities.
That approach would ensure that every playoff participant had actually demonstrated a winning level of baseball over the course of the season.
Option 2: Shrink the playoff field
There is another, perhaps even simpler, solution: don’t replace the teams at all.
If a playoff team finishes below .500, eliminate it and allow the remaining qualified teams to advance. Depending on how many teams are removed, this could mean fewer Wild Card games and additional byes.
Under the standings Snyder examined, only four AL teams would have met his standard. Rather than forcing additional teams into the postseason simply to maintain a predetermined bracket, those four clubs could move directly into the Division Series.
Critics would undoubtedly argue that reducing the number of playoff games takes away some of the excitement and revenue that MLB has intentionally built into its expanded postseason.
But Snyder’s argument is that entertainment should not come at the expense of competitive standards.
A 162-game season is supposed to separate the contenders from the pretenders. If a team cannot finish with at least 82 victories, Snyder believes it should have no chance to win the World Series.
Ultimately, the proposal challenges MLB’s current postseason philosophy: more playoff teams may create more October baseball, but more teams do not necessarily mean more deserving teams. For Snyder, the line should be clear win more games than you lose, or watch the playoffs from home.
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