This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's Nov. 11 College Hoops Tip-off Issue. Subscribe today!
FOR THE FIRST time, this year's World Series features two teams that survived the gimmick of the one-game playoff. But instead of being a triumph, the historic moment served to widen the gap between the value of the regular season and that of the postseason, underscoring that MLB doesn't know how to respect its enormous traditions while keeping up with the times.
Baseball is not the only pro sport with a playoff problem, of course. Basketball and hockey both wrestle with balancing an overlong regular season with a postseason. In the NBA, 16 of 30 teams make the playoffs, although the better squad usually wins because outcomes in that sport tilt toward those with the best player. The NHL, once the sport of dynasties, has made its peace with 8-seeds beating 6-seeds for the Stanley Cup, the inevitable consequence of the salary-cap era. Long live the Red Wings.
But no league is more conflicted than MLB. It was seduced by the stunning end to the 2011 season, which saw the World Series come down to one game between the Cardinals and Rangers. At the same time, it wanted to solve a problem that had vexed it since 1995: incentivizing the wild-card winner to keep playing for the division title after it had qualified for the playoffs. The solution -- the "play-in" -- has been an exciting failure, an unsatisfying compromise between rewarding first place and accommodating the contemporary desire for more playoff teams and more postseason randomness.
If the regular seasons in other leagues are too long, baseball's one-game first round is far too short to reward the sport's special struggle: the arduous daily task of building toward a title. A team is either playoff-worthy or it is not, and penalizing a wild-card team by forcing it to play a sudden-death game undermines 130 years' worth of tradition that says making the postseason earns the right to stick around for more than an afternoon. This isn't the NCAA Midwest regional.
Kansas City and San Francisco did emerge as league champs from this year's poison game, which might seem to legitimize the wild-card gimmick. The truth is actually different. The A's lost a 12-inning classic; the Pirates were shut out at home by Madison Bumgarner. But what both deserved after 45 days of spring training and six months of earning an October berth, pitch by pitch, at-bat by at-bat, wasn't an early vacation but a Game 2. Their qualifying was a waste of Champagne, especially for a sport desperate for national stars. The public saw Andrew McCutchen, reigning NL MVP, for exactly nine innings; we were robbed of witnessing his quest to become an October man.
At the peak of the steroid era, Greg Maddux told me the game has always protected itself from the people who play and run it. This October proved no different. We saw the magical Lorenzo Cain, the Cardinals ruining Clayton Kershaw twice and the Giants again perfecting the art of postseason clutch; the power of the game shone through despite being undermined by its leadership.
But moving forward, if the game's roots and history actually matter, incoming commissioner Rob Manfred must show daring and creativity by eliminating the second wild card and instituting a best-of-seven division series. Although expanded playoffs do not mean less exciting ones -- Giants-Cardinals and A's-Royals proved that -- they do mean fewer titanic struggles between teams worthy of history. In 2013, the two best teams, the Red Sox and Cardinals, actually played for the championship. But this year, the Royals and Giants combined for the second-lowest winning percentage of World Series entrants since 1914. That continues an unmistakable trend: Of the eight World Series teams with the lowest winning percentages over the past century, six have come since the wild-card era began in 1995.
Baseball has chosen to dilute the game, and one-day postseasons further diminish it. The result is a weaker line of champions who no longer have to win the daily struggle, and some potential champions eliminated without a second breath. That's the price of the gimmick, and baseball should be unwilling to pay it.