It seems like a change could be heading to Major League Baseball’s postseason going forward and it has pissed a lot of people off.
Commissioner Rob Manfred held an ‘informal conversation’ with the players association in January to discuss a new playoff format that would introduce the following rules – excerpt from Sports Illustrated:
• Seven teams in each league make the playoffs, up from the current five.
• The wild card games are replaced with a best-of-three wild card series.
• Playoff teams are seeded first by division winners and then by teams with the next four highest win totals. (Ties are broken by head-to-head series. No tiebreaker games for postseason entry or seeding will be held.)
• The No. 1 seed will get a first-round bye. On the Sunday night after teams play the last game of the regular season, a “selection show” will take place in which the No. 2 seed chooses which team it wants to play among the bottom three seeds (Nos. 5, 6 and 7). The No. 3 seed then makes its choice. The No. 4 seed plays the remaining club.
• The higher seed will host all three games in that round.
• The remainder of the postseason–Championship and World Series–remain unchanged. There is no re-seeding after the “wild card series” takes place.
Among the many people who hated this idea was Trevor Bauer.
The Cincinnati Reds pitcher took to Twitter and blasted Manfred as a “joke” over the proposal.
Phillies shortstop Didi Gregorious hated it as well:
Click on ‘Follow Us’ and get notified of the most viral MLB stories via Google! Follow Us
Out of all the sports out of there, Baseball is one sport that fights change and that is one of the reasons it remains behind other sports. You might not like the idea, but it does make the sport more intriguing.
