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As the best teams in baseball have systematically been picked off, one by one, in the MLB playoffs, there’s been the familiar October refrain about how the MLB playoffs, with its one-game wild card, best-of-five division series and two seven-game series to close, are the most unfair in sports. Crowning a World Series champion this way is like deciding a marathon by having the top eight finishers run a 40-yard dash.
It’s true. The baseball playoffs aren’t a meritocracy. The best team rarely wins. But which sports can say differently? Going by the theory used to crush the baseball playoffs, the NCAA tournament is repeated shining moments of unfairness Same with golf tournaments, with their crazy bounces, lucky caroms and shifts in weather. The NHL playoffs may as well be decided by coin flips. Why is the NFL, in which the difference between a coach getting fired and hoisting the Lombardi trophy can often be a handful of plays per season, viewed as the paragon of postseasons, while baseball is badmouthed anytime a wild-card team makes a run?
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I think it has something to do with stats becoming the new baseball gospel. The numbers don’t lie. When distilled, they tell you everything you need to know about a player and team, with enough points of data to make these facts, not theories. It’s a fact the Los Angeles Angels were a better team in 2014 than the Kansas City Royals. Thus, when the Royals sweep a division series, it’s a crime against truth. When the Washington Nationals play 96-win baseball, then can’t hit against a San Francisco Giants team that stumbled to the finish line, it can’t be the right result. Didn’t the regular season mean anything?
Yes, it winnowed the field for the playoffs, then is wiped clean when a new postseason begins. This has been going on for more than a century. Now it’s unfair all of a sudden?
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Nonsense. We watch sports because of the possibility of upsets and the thrill of the unknown. Who would want to watch a so-called “fair” playoffs, in which the teams with the best records kept winning until meeting in the World Series? Where’s the surprise, the unpredictability, the chaos? The Kansas City Royals aren’t the best team in baseball, they’re simply playing the best baseball at the right time. That’s all that counts in any postseason, no matter the sport.
But the pendulum swings too far the other way sometimes. Just because the Royals have won eight straight doesn’t mean Ned Yost is right about bunting, the same way Joe Flacco didn’t suddenly become one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL because Rahim Moore couldn’t defend a pass and the San Francisco 49ers couldn’t score late in Super Bowl XVLII. Losing in the playoffs doesn’t make you bad, winning in the playoffs doesn’t make you great. It’s the uncertainty of it all that keeps our attention.
Embrace the madness.