Over the next few days, perhaps even before Thanksgiving, Major League Baseball and the MLBPA will announce a new labor agreement that will change the shape of the game. We know the new deal will have HGH testing and new compensation rules, and the extra Wild Card team has been an open secret for the better part of a year. In this space, Joe wrote about the balanced leagues a few days ago.
This weekend, Brian Cashman spoke with The Wall Street Journal about the new playoff format, and he made it exceedingly clear that the Yankees recognize the inherent randomness of the playoffs. A one-game, winner-makes-the-ALDS format just drives home the point. “You do not want to be a wild card,” Cashman said to Dan Barbarisi. “The only way you want to be a wild card is if you’re not going to make the playoffs. You definitely want to win the division now.”
It is, of course, an obvious point, and we can highlight the 2001 season in which the 102-win A’s would have played the 85-win Twins in a one-game set for the right to make the Division Series as the perfect example. The Twins could have unseated a team 17 games better than they were. So the Yankees, the team with the most division titles since the advent of the three-division league, will maintain that singular focus on the AL East crown. With a new playoff format, it becomes ever more important to reach that still-infuriating best-of-five set. No one wants to lose Game 163 against an inferior team.
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