The Astros are the real deal with league leading 106 wins.
whereas
The Phillies with only 87 wins are Pretenders finishing the regular season behind …
essentially 6th place in a 15 team league.
Maybe they could save a lot of time and do it like the NCAA Basketball Tournament.
— And the Phillies won the first WS game… Oh My!!!
Bad omen. Look through history. Every time the Phillies do well, the economy tanks.
It only matters who is hot during a 7 game series. The best team over 162 games doesn’t matter.
LOL… The economy has been tanking for over a year and a half, where have you been?
Regular season stats do not matter in October. It’s all about who’s hot now.
Yep. Remember when the Pat’s went undefeated but lost the Super Bowl, the only game that really mattered.
As far as baseball goes I was a casual fan and would go to 5-6 games a year until the pandemic and the Cubs being difficult to watch on free TV.
I have had the same thought, though I haven’t said much about baseball since I don’t follow it that much anymore. However, I have said the same thing about the College Football Playoff being expanded from four to twelve teams. Right now the College Football regular season means a lot, and this expansion will only dilute that. You are moving from which really good teams make the playoffs and which don’t to which marginal ones do and don’t.
Going back to baseball, I remember when there were two divisions per league and each division winner made the playoffs. The season was one long slog, but at the end of the day there were four teams left standing for the playoffs. Each one had proven itself the best in its division over the long season. Did that mean they were the best four teams, period? No, but that was not the point. For a team to make the playoffs it had to win its division. If it did not, no playoffs. The regular season meant something.
As an example, I recall the 1993 season when the Atlanta Braves and San Francisco Giants went down to the wire in the NL West race. The Braves won in the end, and the Giants stayed home. Some said that it was not fair that the Giants missed the playoffs while a team with a worse record, the Phillies, made it from the other division. However, at the same time some sports pundits were pointing out that under the then-proposed new system both teams would have made the playoffs and that drama would have been gone. I think many people overlook the second point and focus too much on the first (along with the extra $$$ that will come) when talking about expanding the playoffs.
And, for the record, for this year, though, I was very happy that MLB had the playoff format that it does. It allowed for the Padres to beat the Dodgers, and being able to watch Dodgers fans melt down after that loss was worth it. 
That is not an apples-to-apples comparison to MLB. By finishing with the best record the Patriots got a week-one bye and also home-field advantage for the divisional playoff games, With the NFL system there was a definite incentive to finish higher in the standing, whereas in MLB just making the playoffs can be good enough.
Edit: I should clarify that with the NFL, since there is only one game and not a multiple-game series for each playoff round, having the home game can make a big difference. In MLB, on other hand, the only difference is one extra home game in a multiple-game series, and that may not make that much of a difference at all.
One sportswriter for the Los Angeles Times said that if MLB really wanted to make an incentive to finish higher in the standings, at least in the earlier rounds were the division winner is supposed to have an earned advantage, it would award one win to the division winner before the series stated. As an example, the Dodgers would have had one win to their credit and would only have needed two wins to win the series against the Padres, whereas the Padres would have needed three wins. He added that will never happen. Right now I wish that was in place, as that would have made the Padres win over the Dodgers that much more funny. 
Additional Edit: With the NFL having a bye-week at the beginning of the playoffs can allow a team to rest up and heal some injuries, and that can be a big advantage playing a team that has not been off and had to play the prior week. With baseball, by contrast, if a team has a long layoff it can get out of sync, which can be a disadvantage when playing a team that just finished winning a previous series. That is an unintended consequence of the MLB playoffs that I suspect we will be hearing more about.
One of the alleged reasons for playoff expansion is it gives small market teams a better chance at making the playoffs therefore giving them less of a reason to firesale their players at the trade deadline
Tell that to the fans in Oakland, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. That argument is more an indictment of MLB’s economic model that favors larger market teams and is stacked against smaller market teams than anything else.
One idea that I heard many years ago was to group the teams in divisions by market size or payroll size. That way the small market teams with smaller payrolls would be competing against each other for one playoff spot. I do not think that is practical, nor do I support it. I am just mentioning it as a point along the lines with your comment.
I don’t disagree, MLB has made numerous mistakes over the decades.
It seems like every time the NFL does something smart there is a reciprocal dumb move by MLB.
Alleged is the appropriate word. The playoffs, as well regular seasons, have been extended for one reason only, money. That’s why we have the World Series in November, the Stanley Cup in June, the NFL with 17 games and a Super Bowl in January, and the NBA championship in July. That same need for money has also greatly inflated ticket prices. We sometimes travel to see an NHL game, and the price is now $120-150 for what I will call an average seat and double that for seat near the center of the rink.
The MLB season is a marathon compared to the NFL. Many teams start the season on a sour note and may not be contending for the division championship after June, but improve enough in the next months to contend for a playoff spot. That way teams who are playing the best as the season winds down get a chance to play that way in postseason, and they sometimes eliminate some of the fast starters who are playing like crap at season’s end…
I remember many years ago, though I can’t remember the exact year, when the Seattle Seahawks began the year poorly but finished strongly at the end. They were playing as well as any team in the NFL when the season ended, but they just missed the playoffs. Pundits pointed out that every game in the NFL season carried equal weight and it did not matter who was playing best and who was playing poorly when the season ended. The contrast was with college football, where it was better to lose a game early in the season that late.
Personally, I think that if MLB is going to use the expanded playoff format, they should shorten the regular season. As it is, you now have a long regular-season slog followed by a shorter mini-slog in the playoffs. Of course, that will never happen.
The Better team won in the end. They were Astronomically Better!!!
Yep, by a wide margin.
Even if I weren’t a huge Astros fan, I would be happy for Dusty Baker. Super classy!
I quit watching after the 95 strike. MLB should have put in a salary cap for all teams and revenue sharing where the MLB controlled all games and contracts. No separate deals like the Yankees or other big market teams. This would have saved the game. Its dying now as the stadiums are being built smaller and less fans watch.
Good luck in getting the big market teams and the MLBPA to ever go for that.
they should have done it 95. If the players didn’t want it you move up the AAA to the majors and charge $10 a ticket They would have caved
