Randomness and Baseball's Playoffs
Making sense of Texas-Arizona, plus a modest proposal for fixing the "feel" of baseball's playoff.
That baseball season wraps up as the NBA is about to start is a good reminder of just how different sports can be. The NBA is a game about star power, where the better teams are typically much better than the worse teams. Baseball is a game about depth and contributions throughout your lineup.
And even though the NBA and MLB playoffs are structured similarly—with 7-game series constituting the format of the semi-final and final rounds—they feel massively different. With the NBA finals, you see the tete-a-tete of great players unfolding, and a sequence of small strategic nudges to improve the efficiency of the very best players. The best players who take up most of the possessions, and thus who have the biggest impact on the game. (The Nuggets’ Jokic and Murray, for instance, had a combined usage rate of about 60% in their title-raising 2023 playoff campaign.)
In baseball, you get the sense that we’re watching very even teams compete and somewhat arbitrarily awarding the title. Does 3-consecutive losses to the Diamondbacks take away the Dodger’s 100 wins this season? No. Would Vegas make Arizona the favorite in another 3-game series? Also no.
In some sense, that’s the magic of sports. In another sense, baseball’s playoffs don’t offer the winner any real credible claim to being the best team.
To bring in another sport—consider football. In the NFL, the mythos is that of “Any Given Sunday”. It’s well accepted that the best team may not win the game. But it’s not about being the best team, it’s about winning the Super Bowl. And every bit of luck, grit, toughness to get there is welcome. That works when your playoffs are a single-elimination format.
But also, the NFL has massive skill disparities between its teams that makes upsets relatively unlikely. In fact, the skill gap between the 12-teams that makes the NFL playoffs is 2nd widest among major American sports—behind the NBA, and ahead of the NHL and MLB respectively. That is, in the NFL, the best playoff-making team has the second-greatest odds of beating the worst playoff-making team, across all major American sports.
In fact, they’re expected to win about 75% of the time. So a single elimination game is actually reasonably deterministic. In the NBA, that number rises to 85%, while both baseball and hockey are below 70%.
But that only compares the best and worst teams. What about the teams with a reasonable chance of winning the title? Among the top 6 teams in each league’s playoff, the discrepancies between all the teams narrow to about 10% except for the NFL. Which maintains a disparity of about 15%.
That is, in the NBA, MLB, or NHL, the best team to make the playoffs has about a 60/40 chance of beating the 6th best team. In the NFL, the difference is closer to 65/35. In Vegas terms, that’s moving from a -150 moneyline to a -185 moneyline for the favorite.
And, because of the large skill disparities between NFL teams, they can do away with long playoff series and still have some semblance of sanity. The better team has about the same chance of winning a single NFL game, as the better baseball or hockey team has of winning a 7-game playoff series.
For instance, the Astros and Phillies are separated by only by about two percentage points: 51/49. Over the course of a 7-game series, both have about the same chance of winning.
But if the best two NFL teams met today—49ers and the Dolphins—the favored 49ers would prevail 16-percent more often, winning 58 games out of 100 to the Dolphins 42.
The single-game Super Bowl is actually more predictable than a 7-game series between elite baseball teams. Both because of team skill disparity in football and because of team skill balance at the top of the MLB.
In the NBA finals last year, the Nuggets were 60/40 favorites in each game over the Miami heat, which translates to about 70% favorites for the 7-game series.
The level of randomness in these series may not be explicitly known by most sports fans, but it is certainly felt. And it is embedded in the sports themselves. Again: compare the idea of “Any Given Sunday” to the way we think about basketball or baseball.
One sport—football—embraces and celebrates the randomness. The others mask it with long, seven-game series.
Baseball playoffs: A modest proposal
How could baseball improve the playoffs? By taking a page from the college playbook. The College World Series—for both baseball and softball—uses a double-elimination format that maximizes for drama and high-impact games.
In a double elimination tournament, teams play through a knockout bracket—much like in March Madness—but get reseeded after a loss. And teams are not eliminated from the tournament until they have lost two games.
Because teams can lose two games before being eliminated, the double elimination format removes some of the perceived “luck” problem from a single elimination tournament. All the while, it keeps the excitement of elimination games and tacitly acknowledges that—at least for baseball—the difference in likelihood of a team winning a single game versus a series is small enough to be ignored.
Further, we would recommend preceding the double elimination knockout stage—the “World Series” stage— with a grouped round-robin stage—the “Pennant” stage. During this group-play stage, the playoff qualifying teams would be divided into four groups of three—keeping the 12 playoff qualifiers—and each play a single three game series against the other teams in the group. This would total three three-game series for each of the four groups, for a total of 36 playoff games in the Pennant Stage. Plus 6 or 7 World Series stage games, and the total number of games (42) is approximately equal to what the MLB’s current format amounts to.
The entire format could still be resolved within a month. Over the first two weeks of October, the Pennant Stage series would be played at the sites of the higher seeded teams—guaranteeing an extra six home gates for the winningest two teams in each conference. The final two weeks of October would feature a World Series weekend and a final weekend.
During the World Series weekend, the first two rounds of the double-elimination tournament would play out: deciding who the final two teams World Series teams would be over the course of four games. These games would need to be played all in the same city—creating a Super Bowl weekend like atmosphere and an opportunity to celebrate baseball. The last round would be hosted by the undefeated team.
Example - The 2023 Playoffs
To see how this format would play out, we can use the 2023 playoffs as an example. This year, 12 teams qualified for the playoffs. Six from each conference. Based on the current seeding, those teams would have been split into two American League groups and two National League groups as follows for the Pennant Stage:
AL Group 1: (1) Baltimore , (4) Tampa Bay, (6) Toronto
AL Group 2: (2) Houston , (3) Minnesota, (5) Texas
NL Group 1: (1) Atlanta , (4) Philadelphia, (6) Arizona
NL Group 2: (2) Los Angeles , (3) Milwaukee Bay, (5) Miami
Based on the actual results of the playoffs this year, we can assume that Baltimore, Texas, Arizona and Los Angeles would have won their respective groups. These four teams would qualify for the double-elimination World Series stage.
The World Series stage would be played in two weekends, the first of which is played in a single city. In this case, we’ll imagine that the World Series weekend is being hosted in St. Louis, Missouri.
Friday would feature American League and National League championship matchups.
Saturday features the winners matchup—deciding who gets to host the World Series—and an elimination matchup, knocking the first team out of the World Series.
Sunday is the final World Series qualifier.
Again, based on real results from the 2023 playoffs, we might assumed Texas beats Baltimore and Arizona beats Los Angeles in the Friday games. Then Texas triumphs over Arizona—securing the right to host the World Series final—and Los Angeles knocks out Baltimore in the Saturday games. Then Arizona knocks off L.A. in the final qualifier on Sunday night.
Lastly, Texas would hots Arizona for at least one—potentially two final World Series games to close out the tournament.
Baseball’s viewership problems.
Baseball’s postseason can draw eyeballs to the television when there’s drama. Both of the recent game 7s—Texas/Houston and Philly/Arizona—drew more than 6.5 million viewers. But that’s still roughly half of an NBA Finals game, or a Monday night Football Game. More high-stakes games, and a format that drives quickly towards suspense, could increase baseball’s role in the public consciousness—boosting its TV numbers—and also be more faithful to the fundamentals of baseball itself.
Mid-season Shuffle
Beyond baseball’s postseason problems, many commentators chastise the baseball regular season for being too long. I won’t comment on this as much—because regular seasons all have diminishing returns in terms of information. But the real problem is that the season is too stale.
To add spice, baseball could have the teams play in three regional divisions (east, central, west) for the first half of the year, and then play in the traditional two conferences (American League, National League) the second half. The division leaders could easily play in a brief mid-season knockout tournament during All-Star weekend.
This would prevent baseball from needing to cut inventory, and add flavor to the league’s long season. It would also stoke regional rivalries and create additional valuable TV properties.
Related Reading
If this is something that interests you, there are plenty of others talking about restructuring, including:
Jeff Schultz’s suggestions for the baseball playoff format: reseeding, shortening the regular season, expand to 16 teams.
Ken Rosenthal’s suggestions for changing baseball’s playoffs:
Non-traditional Sports commentators weighing in on the format (Washington Post, National Review)