How can you not be romantic about back-to-back quadruple-headers? Well...

I have spent more time than I care to admit over the past few seasons bemoaning the fact that 40% of Major League Baseball teams now qualify for the postseason.

The downstream effects of this can be felt on summer days when the sport’s signature marathon feels sapped of value relative to the October sprint; on September nights, when the fight for the final playoff spots is increasingly the domain of the sport’s mediocre middle; even on winter afternoons, when we’re forced to wonder if teams are trying to save a few bucks and forgo trying to be a 90-win team when being an 85-win team might do just as well.

There are at least two days on the calendar, though, when these concerns recede and I find myself forgetting why I was so worked up in the first place. These are, of course, the days when it actually comes time to play these extra playoff games, when we get back-to-back days of wall-to-wall playoff baseball, with the possibility of even more on Day 3.

In 2022, MLB expanded the playoffs to include an additional wild card team per league, turning the wild card round from one single-game playoff in each league to one featuring four total best-of-three matchups.

Diluted regular season? Transparent cash grab? 84-78 pennant winners? Not now! I’m watching playoff baseball and I’m going to be watching playoff baseball for the next 11 hours and then I’m going to do it again tomorrow. On Tuesday and Wednesday, the first game begins at 2 p.m. Eastern and the fourth and final one starts at 10 p.m. The schedule is currently the same for Thursday, but some teams might be eliminated by then.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter and/or know me outside of it, you know I like to stick to the cold, unfeeling numbers, but let’s not forget all this is supposed to be fun. And the MLB postseason gives us a ton of fun, with the new wild card round supplying its fair share.

The stakes might be lowest in this preliminary part of the tournament, but like the opening weekend of March Madness or the group stage of this past World Cup, the “firehose” is part of the appeal: non-stop action, one game after another. It’s hard to beat.

I do wish more of us could acknowledge the postseason as simply a source of entertainment, since it is actually a pretty bad way of picking who the best team is in a given year. Instead, it is still far too often seen as some kind of divining rod or, worse, a morality play, where the team that won did so because of their players’ strength of heart, while the losers succumbed to their innate mental frailty. Pay no mind to the soft dribblers that became run-scoring singles or the obliterated liners right into an opponent's glove, or the fact that there don't seem to be factors that correlate significantly with October success beyond just being a good team from April to September.

We’re only a few years removed from when the Dodgers were not seen as the villains of the sport but as perennial choke artists whose leadership was holding them back from October glory. Manager Dave Roberts needed to be “immediately fired” after the 2019 season because he was “not the man for [the] task.” If he was in the dugout for the 2020 season, the first of his three World Series-winning campaigns as manager, “it will signify that the organization isn’t willing to do what’s necessary to make big changes, and just hope[s] more of the same will work.¹”

We're talking about a team that had just finished a four-year stretch where it averaged 98 wins and won two pennants; "more of the same" shouldn't have been meant as a bad thing, but the collective sporting public is so playoff-brained that this line of thinking was more prevalent than acknowledging seven baseball games just don't carry that much information.

Expanding the field divorces us even more from having the postseason be a reflection of which teams were best from April to September, which is ultimately why I think it fails. While the top seeds still only need to win three rounds to lift the piece of metal (as they have since 1995²), when they fail to do so, there is more room for relative mediocrity to ascend to the sport's biggest stages. This occurred in both of the first two years of the 12-team postseason. 84-win Arizona met 90-win Texas in the 2023 World Series, a year after the Phillies won 87 games and finished in third place in the NL East but still reached the Fall Classic.

Perhaps this can be viewed as a feature, and to a certain extent it is. From an entertainment standpoint, it's not hard to see the appeal of the early rounds of baseball's postseason compared to the quasi-deterministic early rounds of the NBA playoffs. What basketball really has going for it, though, is a higher probability of delivering heavyweight fights in the later rounds, despite letting an even higher percentage of its teams into the postseason than MLB.

A small number of basketball games contains way more signal than a baseball series, with the latter being massively influenced by things like sequencing and the inherent capriciousness of batted balls.

The difference is not trivial. A 2017 study found that the better teams in an NBA postseason series advance about 80% of the time, compared to just over 60% for a best-of-seven baseball series. For MLB to have its better teams advance at the same rate as those in the NBA, the study found baseball would need to have its postseason matchups be best-of-75!

Rob Mains of Baseball Prospectus found that even when the gaps between teams are wide, the outcomes are not as certain as we might think (subscription required). He writes that a 104-win team should be expected to beat an 84-win team in a seven-game series about 74% of the time; in other words, comparing the two studies, the average favorite in the NBA would be expected to advance at a higher rate than even some of the heaviest favorites in MLB.

Per these calculations, even if a 104-win team played an 84-win team in each of the first two rounds, they'd be little better than a coin toss (if that, given the five-game Division Series) to reach the World Series.

Now MLB has provided even more opportunities for these teams with win totals in the mid-80s.

It’s hard not to feel like this waters down the regular season, reducing the stakes of those summer nights that were (and to be fair, still are) such a big part of what makes the sport special...

But like I said, for the next few days, we don't have to worry about any of this. Let’s just enjoy the firehose.