On Wednesday night, the 106-win Los Angeles Dodgers will be playing a one-game playoff to advance to the National League Division Series, knowing that the 88-win Atlanta Braves and 95-win Milwaukee Brewers do not need to worry about this game because they won their divisions.
They’ll also be facing a St. Louis Cardinals team that has 16 fewer wins than them.
I think that’s great for baseball.
There are two big reasons why: it makes winning the division truly meaningful and keeps more fanbases invested in the pennant chase.
Let’s start with the value of a division title. The Dodgers find themselves in the Wild Card Game because their 106 wins came just one win short of the 107-win San Francisco Giants. The Giants narrowly won the season series 10-9, but that wound up giving them the edge to secure the luxury of a guaranteed best-of-five series that the Dodgers will not have.
The Dodgers are allowed to complain about their situation compared to the Braves or Brewers but when you lose your season series to the division champion, I find it much harder to be sympathetic, even if it was decided by just one game.
Of course, LA’s record against the Giants wasn’t the only thing that sent them to the Wild Card Game. The Giants also won more games against the two weakest teams in the division: the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Colorado Rockies. The Giants went 32-6 against the duo while the Dodgers were 29-9, a difference of three wins in a division race decided by a single game.
The Giants also managed to be noticeably better in one-run contests than the Dodgers. The division champs were 31-17 in their closest games while the Dodgers finished with a .500 record at 24-24. On top of their .500 record in one-run games, LA similarly struggled in extra innings, going 6-13.
Clearly, the Dodgers did plenty of things well this year to win 106 games, but there are still multiple situations where just a few more wins would’ve meant that the Giants were the team that was going to play the Cardinals on Wednesday.
It might not be fair that the Dodgers didn’t get an automatic appearance in the NLDS this year but either way, the existence of the Wild Card Game provided drama that wouldn’t have existed prior to 2012.
If the Dodgers and Giants spent all year neck-and-neck while clearing 100 wins in 2011, would people have really cared about who got home-field advantage in the NLDS? Two longtime rivals spending the entire year battling because winning the division provided a meaningful incentive is a good thing for the sport.
Now, let’s address the value of having more fanbases invested in the pennant chase.
If eight teams made the playoffs instead of ten, then the Cardinals winning 17 straight games from September 11 to September 28 would’ve been nothing more than a footnote. All they would’ve been was just a minor annoyance to the Brewers as they still managed to win the division by five games. Instead, the streak was the latest example of #CardinalsDevilMagic, seeing St. Louis rocket past the San Diego Padres and Cincinnati Reds to claim the second Wild Card spot by a remarkable seven games.
I mean, come on, just look at their playoff odds graph from Fangraphs and tell me you’re opposed to the idea of two wild cards.
Even if the Cardinals didn’t go on a 17-game winning streak, the second Wild Card spot still meant that fans in multiple NL markets were watching meaningful playoff baseball entering September. This wouldn’t have been the case in 2011, with the loser of the Dodgers/Giants division race pulling away from the field. On the morning of September 1, there were four teams meaningfully fighting for the Wild Card Game, with the Philadelphia Phillies joining the aforementioned trio of the Cardinals, Reds and Padres.
Ten teams feel like a sweet spot, making sure that good teams almost always get in but without including weaker teams just so everyone can feel like their team has a chance.
When MLB used a 16-team playoff last year as part of pandemic rule changes, the 29-31 Houston Astros came within one game of the World Series and 31-29 Miami Marlins swept the NL Central champion Chicago Cubs in a three-game series. Neither of those outcomes felt especially enjoyable and illustrated why ten playoff teams is a much better outcome than 16. There’s a line between having fanbases invested and devaluing the regular season and I feel like that line is at ten, or maybe 12, but certainly not 16.
If the Dodgers lose on Wednesday it will be an immensely frustrating ending for their fans but I will still happily take it, knowing that’s the point of the Wild Card Game.
BSL Analyst
Rose Katz is a recent graduate of the University of Maryland’s journalism school, where she worked for The Diamondback as the online managing editor and a sports blogger. As a student, she spent almost all of her time on campus in The Diamondback’s newsroom or at Xfinity Center, Ludwig Field and Maryland Stadium. Rose gained intern experience with the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN).