Thursday’s new Collective Bargaining Agreement between Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association brought with it a change to the Postseason format. Instead of the 14-team postseason format desired by team owners (for obvious reasons), a 12-team format was ultimately approved by both sides. This (verbatim) from USA Today‘s Gabe Lacques:

“For now, MLB is not altering the number of divisions – there will be six, five-team divisions, though that may grow to eight and four should the league expand to 32 teams, as commissioner Rob Manfred has intimated is possible in coming years. All six division winners will earn playoff berths, but not all will get the advantage of rest they currently enjoy.

“Instead, the division winners with the two best records will receive first-round byes, with the remaining division winner and three wild cards meeting in best-of-three wild-card series. The winners of those series would advance to the division series, and the playoffs as we’ve known them since 1995 (division series, LCS, World Series) would commence.

“There are plenty of suboptimal details in the fine print, most notably that the wild-card round will be a best-of-three format in which the higher seed hosts all three games. That will certainly result in multiple teams going home without playing a game in front of their home crowd, calling into question the meaning of what exactly constitutes a “playoff appearance.”

“And in order to facilitate a quick turnaround and avoid top seeds sitting out too long, tiebreaking games will no longer be contested to break deadlocks atop a division, or to determine the final playoff participant. So say goodbye to some of the most titillating baseball, courtesy of Game 163, played over the years.“

The obvious advantage to this new postseason format is that teams can no longer ‘luck their way into the postseason‘ via a ‘Game 163.’ Instead, teams must ‘earn their way in‘ via their regular-season records.

…and you gotta love that.

Play Ball!

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