Baseball Playoffs

I am a huge Braves fan and I watch them all season long, every year. I probably catch between 100-120 games a year so it's safe to say I keep up with the team pretty consistently. The only time I don't watch is when I'm out of town or somewhere I can't watch it. I started watching the Braves in 1991, when I was 7 years old, and that was the year that began the 14 consecutive division titles. So even though the last 4 years they haven't made the playoffs, for 14 of the 18 years I've been watching they have. After watching the Braves go through this long, 6-month season, the thing I can't stand is to watch them die out in the first round, in 3 or 4 games. So, this has made me think of ways the playoffs could be better.

After watching a great team go through 162 games, and following that team, knowing they are going to make the playoffs for the last month of the season and being excited about it, the team has a bad pitching performance and one of the top hitters hits a dry spell and next thing you know they get swept in 3 games. My opinion: this is ridiculous!

There is no way after all of that long season that it should come down to such a short series. The least baseball could do is make it a 7-game series. But I want more, in fact, I want the Division Series, LCS, and World Series to be 9-game series. Why? Because in baseball the best team rarely wins and this would help to determine a more true champion. The first 3 games would be held at one team's park, then 4 games at the other, and then switch again for the final 2 games.

There's a saying in baseball that goes "you're only as good as your next day's starting pitcher", and that is true. So if you've got your ace on the hill in game 1 of the series and he doesn't have his good stuff, you're down 0-1. Then he may never get to pitch again for the rest of the series! A starting rotation needs to be turned over at least once in a playoff series, and you should have to beat someone's ace twice before you can sweep them. If you can do that then you deserve to move on quickly.

And the logistics of this are not a problem. I love the NBA Playoffs because there is a great game on every night, and yet the series last 2 weeks so I don't get hit every night with the same teams. When the Hawks are in the playoffs, I get a day or two between games...I like that, time to digest it. But the problem is when you get to the Finals, the most important series, it is boring and easy to lose interest because of the gap between games since there are no other series going on. So a 9-game series for all 3 rounds in baseball works great because you're making each series a week and a half long and the games are each day (with the exception of travel days). So you don't lose interest, and at least after having watched my team for 6 months, they'll get a week before they're ousted instead of 3 days.

As for the length of the playoffs, which would now go from about 27 days to about 35 days, you would want to still end everything in late October. To do this you would have to start the playoffs a week earlier, so just start the season a week earlier and begin the playoffs around September 25th.

Some people might say they should add more rounds and not expand the series. Well, baseball is a marathon and so you need to keep the playoff teams at a minimum because you don't want to let the "pretty good" teams in....they might win it all because like I said the best team rarely wins. If you wanted a true champion then you'd just play the regular season and whoever was on top of all of baseball would win. Of course, that doesn't spark interest and they need a playoff system to keep the fans interested and create excitement at the end of the season.

You don't hear many people calling for much change in the baseball playoffs, probably because it occurs during football season and people have lost interest in baseball by then. But as a fan of a team who is usually in contention, I would like to see a more drawn out playoffs, I think it would be better.

JB