Welcome to Snyder’s Soapbox! Here, I highlight stories related to Major League Baseball every week. Some of the topics will be pressing issues, some may seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and many will be somewhere in between. The good thing about this website is that it is free, and you are allowed to click away. If you stay, you’ll be wiser, though. That’s a money back guarantee. Let’s get to it.
Of the major professional sports in North America, there are four leagues with at least 30 teams: NBA, NFL, NHL and this, our Major League Baseball. MLB has a very special playing field.
- MLB: 12 of 30 teams (40%)
- NFL: 14 of 32 teams (43.75%)
- NHL: 16 of 32 teams (50%)
- NBA: 16 of 30 teams (53.3%)
Now, the NBA also has four more teams participating in the Play-in games, but there’s no need to bother there. The point is that MLB has the toughest league in terms of making the playoffs. And I’d still argue it’s too easy.
Just look at the percentages. Aren’t the playoffs supposed to consist of games between the best teams to determine the season champions? In what sector is the top 40% of anything considered the cream of the crop? Do colleges flock to recruit students who rank between the 35th and 40th percentile? If you’re ranked in the 38th percentile in your sales career, do you think you deserve an award?
In Major League Baseball, the 83-win Reds made the playoffs last season. In 2024, two 86-win teams earned a season berth. In 2023, two 84-win teams made the postseason and one of them ended up in the World Series.
However, people still want an expanded playoff field. Most of the time it is based on the misconception that farewells are bad for the best teams. If we went up to eight teams per league, there would be no byes!
Yes, I have stories for those people and they are not good. It’s actually pretty bad. It’s a recipe for disaster because sometimes, we end up seeing a team with a losing record take on a 100+ win team in the first round.
This type of theater is appreciated in other sports. Hey, I think it’s fun when a 16 seed gives a 1 seed a run for its money in the NCAA basketball tournament because it’s a spectacle of an event.
This is not the best way to determine which team is truly the best, though, especially not in baseball, where the worst team in the league can take a series of smaller samples than the best team.
Much of this discussion about “hello” being “wrong” for good teams happened after the 2023 Braves lost their first series after a 104-win regular season. They lost because of the bye, right? Did those people forget they were swept by the Marlins in mid-September or lost a series to the 71-win Cardinals earlier that month?
Where baseball is the result of sports being set up to determine the best team is the largest sample of play. The most important position on the field at any given time is the pitcher and teams rotate between four to six starting pitchers at different positions in the system. This would be similar to NFL teams revolving around quarterbacks.
There are fans who are die-hard enough to say that MLB should never have changed the structure since each league just sent the team with the best regular season record straight to the World Series. Some even said that there should be no qualifiers and the best record should be the champion because of the marathon nature of this game.
I am not a strict person. The playoffs are incredible theater.
Furthermore, I have not forgotten that MLB will ever eliminate playoff teams from the field. You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube. There are a lot of fans involved in the finals. We are almost four months into our six months into the season and only six teams can be said to be in contention at this point. All in all, that’s good for the game. Many fan bases hang around for a long time.
There are also an awful lot of teams not in the finals discussion. Some will take them out. We’ll get one or two in the playoffs that aren’t yours, though, and let’s hope they don’t end up making a deep run. A battle between two 100-win World Series titans is far better in this game than an 84-win team in five games versus a 90-win team.
If the season ends today, the 2026 playoffs will be filled with a lot of middle-of-the-road teams as we look down the barrel of the CBA battle this coming season. I bring up the latter because, in general, both sides like multiple teams to play. Owners love an easy chance at a postseason travel boom, not to mention an increase from last season when the playoff race really heats up. Players like better chances to play in the postseason, too (and the playoff assignments that come with it).
Let’s hope the league and the MLBPA are more tied up with other things this coming season. We have a lot of playoff teams. We don’t need more to continue cleaning up an already heavily cleaned field.
