The "Crapshoot" Myth is Owner Propaganda
Stop calling the playoffs random!
It’s the end of Baseball Week! Obviously, baseball will continue for a few more weeks, but Undrafted is wrapping up our focus on the game today. If you’ve liked any of the newsletter pieces this week, please consider sharing it with a friend! Today, we’re finishing up our Baseball Week extravaganza with a discussion of a very annoying myth that will not die: that baseball’s postseason is a crapshoot.
The conventional wisdom is that baseball’s postseason is a crapshoot. It’s a coin toss, it’s chaos, it’s a tournament that has little to do with regular season success. That once you get to the playoffs, every team has a chance and the outcomes are little more than random. Certainly that seems like the case this year, with the 111-win Dodgers, who had the best run differential of any team in 85 years, losing in four games to a Padres team that finished 22 games worse in the regular season; on the very same day, the defending champion Atlanta Braves were knocked off by a Phillies team that finished 14 games back in the NL East. And then you can throw in the Padres knocking off the 101-win New York Mets in the Wild Card round.
Certainly seems pretty random! And so every October, people cry out* that baseball’s regular season is meaningless, that it has been so cheapened by the addition of wild cards and extra rounds to the postseason. Look at last year’s World Series winner: an 88-win Braves team that upset the 106-win Dodgers and the 95-win Astros. Clearly that proves how little the regular season matters…
*I don’t like arguing against “some people say” narratives, because it’s usually cherry-picking (WHO says that, exactly?) but it’s not just curmudgeons like Keith Olbermann saying this. Joe Posnanski and other good baseball writers have been on about this for a while, and the trigger for a writing about this was a tweet by generally perceptive Timothy Burke. This really does seem to be something people just accept without questioning.
But, 2022’s craziness notwithstanding, the “crapshoot” narrative is pretty overstated. In fact, baseball’s regular season is a pretty good predictor of the postseason. Yes, the 2021 Braves seem like a mediocre winner, but they are the exception, not the rule. Here’s the rule, over the last decade:
2020: The Dodgers had the best record in baseball; they won the World Series (against the Tampa Bay Rays, who had the best record in the American League).
2018: The Boston Red Sox had the best record in baseball; they won the World Series (against the Dodgers, making the second of what would be three World Series appearances in four years).
2017: The Dodgers had the best record in baseball; they made the World Series, but lost to the Astros (who won 101 games themselves that year, only three fewer than Los Angeles).
2016: The Cubs had the best record in baseball; they won the World Series.
2015: The Kansas City Royals had the best record in the American League; they won the World Series.
2013: There was a tie for the best record in baseball, between the Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals, who both won 97 games. The World Series that year featured… the Red Sox and the Cardinals!
In total, six of the last ten World Series champions went into the playoffs as 1-seed – a higher percentage than the Super Bowl and the same as the NBA Finals.
Even most supposed exceptions don’t really fit the “crapshoot” narrative. In 2019, the Nationals won the World Series despite only 93 wins in the regular season. But after a terrible start that year, the Nats played at a 107-win pace for the final four months of the season – that was really a loaded team (Juan Soto, Max Scherzer, Anthony Rendon, Stephen Strasburg, etc.) whose record didn’t show how good they were. In 2014, the Giants and Royals met in the World Series, despite neither team cracking 90 wins. But the Giants were en route to their third title in five years, and the Royals were in their first of back-to-back Series appearances. That was a matchup of a team at the tail end of a great run and another team at the beginning of one – not really a random outcome.
And it’s not just the World Series outcomes that bely the “crapshoot” myth. In the era of two wild card teams, from 2012-2021, teams with the better record were 51-38 in playoff series – that’s not exactly dominant, but also better than a coin toss. And in case you think this might just be random variance, note that the numbers get better when the gaps between teams increase: Teams at least five games better than their postseason opponent were 33-20 in that decade. That’s a .623 win percentage, or roughly as dominant as a 100-win team. In other words, the better team usually wins, and the better you are, the more likely you are to win.
Upsets happen, as they do in any playoff format, but baseball’s postseason is not random or a crapshoot or a coin toss. So how did this narrative take hold?
Certainly it has something to do with the fact that, over the last few years especially, so many 100-win teams have been eliminated in the early postseason rounds. This season saw four teams win at least 101 games, and three were eliminated before the League Championship Series. Last season saw three 100-win teams, and none made the World Series. Since 2017, it seems like practically every playoff round features some dominant regular season team going down.
Often these are teams with historic, franchise-record win totals. And so it is understandably surprising to see them lose before the World Series. Making the World Series after seasons like those used to be almost automatic. When you watch a team set a franchise record for wins, and then get bounced from the playoffs in five games, it isn’t crazy to think the regular season is meaningless.
But the problem here is not really the playoff format. This is really an extension of what I wrote about earlier this month: the disappearance of baseball’s “middle class,” or the teams that finish between 75 and 95 wins.
The problem is that there are so many dominant teams AT THE SAME TIME. For example, last year, the San Francisco Giants had a historic season, winning a franchise-record 107 games, only to be dismissed in the Division Series. But they lost to a 106-win Dodgers team who tied their OWN franchise record for wins. The fact is that most of the great regular season teams that have been eliminated over the last few years lost to OTHER great regular season teams, who often had even better records than they did. There have certainly been upsets, but the real issue is that when you have more “dominant regular season teams” than World Series spots, then some are necessarily going to lose before they get there.
If historic regular seasons don’t feel like they used to, it’s because they happen all the time now. This year, the Dodgers broke their franchise record for wins – which was only set in 2019, and tied again last season. Last year, the Giants set their franchise record for wins. In 2019, the Houston Astros set theirs. In 2018, the Red Sox set theirs.
We can’t really pretend that these amazing regular season records mean what they used to, given the current competitive environment. It’s not the playoffs that are cheapening the regular season – the regular season is cheapening itself because so many teams don’t care about it: The rise in teams that are barely trying to win from April through September has made the October outcomes seem “random” by inflating the win totals of the teams that try.
For example, this year, the Atlanta Braves won 101 games, but 49 of those wins came against teams that lost at least 93 games. In 2003, they also won 101 games, but only 26 wins came against such teams. For the Mets, 43 of their 101 wins this year came against 93-loss teams or worse; in 1988, when they won 100 games, only 18 of their wins came against teams that bad.
It’s just easier to be a “dominant regular season team” now, which means there are more of them, which means they can’t all advance far in the postseason. And being a 100-win team just means less than it used to. Let’s look at Atlanta’s record this year against teams that won at least 70 games. Notice this cutoff — this isn’t their record against GOOD teams. A team that won 70 games would have finished eight games behind the last place Red Sox this season. A 70-win team is by no means good; it’s just not quite dreadful. It’s enough to signal that you’re at least trying. And yet Atlanta’s record against teams that were trying was only 52-44, or about an 88-win pace over a full season. Now is it so surprising they lost a series to the 87-win Phillies?
There is no playoff format that fixes this. You could eliminate the postseason entirely and go back to a pre-1969 World Series that just included pennant winners, but then 100-win teams like the Braves and Mets would be eliminated even earlier. The real problem is the lack of competitive balance in the sport, not the format of the postseason.
Every time you complain about baseball’s postseason being a “crapshoot,” you are obscuring this fact. You are running interference for the owners, who love to point to the supposedly random playoffs as an excuse for not winning. The Ricketts family can say, “Look, it’s not our fault that our would-be dynasty stumbled after 2016! It’s that the playoffs are too random. But we had great regular seasons and now our ‘competitive window’ is closed – might as well trade all our good players and start over again.”
And most of the solutions to a supposedly flukey playoff system – Shorten the regular season and add games to the Wild Card round! Make the division series seven games! – are great for the owners: They love more playoff games, which mean more national TV revenue that is insulated from actual team performance.
It’s not that I think the owners cast some spell on baseball fans to make them believe the crapshoot myth – when you watch a team like the 2022 Dodgers lose in four games to a Padres team that won 22 fewer games and lost to them 14 times during the season, the playoffs really do feel random! And of course luck plays a huge role in October – time and chance happen to them all, and all that. We also tend to remember the upsets like the ones that happened in the National League this year, and forget about the more typical outcomes, like the top two teams advancing in the American League. And we tend to notice playoff upsets more than a last place team losing 100 games instead of 92. So the crapshoot myth starts from a place of salience and fan emotion.
But in general, the myths that endure are the ones that benefit the ownership class, and this one really does help them. Pay no attention to the real issue plaguing baseball! All the owners tanking their teams to save money on payroll are not the problem – the real problem is that the playoffs are slightly too long or slightly too short. Better keep tinkering with that while the Pirates lose 100 games again and the Nationals trade a generational talent three years before he’s a free agent…
Of course, we will never legislate luck out of the game. But we might be able to seize the means of production. So let’s try that first.