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Chicago Cubs: Rob Manfred does it again with playoff format proposal
By Paul Seifert
Chicago Cubs fans have endured some bad baseball over the years. But Rob Manfred has again proven we don’t have an exclusive right to dumb baseball.
I have written fairly extensively about the ridiculous ideas emanating from Major League Baseball’s New York headquarters. From the still-looming train wreck, his slew of preseason proposals a year ago, to some outright daft ideas, it seems just when the crazy train had pulled into its last station, Manfred starts the engine again. His latest? Completely changing the format of the postseason.
As I understand it, the proposed changes would be:
- Increasing the number of NL and AL postseason teams from five to seven by adding two more Wild Card teams
- The best team in each league gets a first-round bye and advances automatically to the Division Series.
- A Selection Day when the second-best teams from each league picks its first postseason opponent
- Increase Wild Card games from a single game to best-of-three series
- Two other division winners and top wild card team host all games of three-game series in the Wild Card round
Chicago Cubs: So how would this play out
I’ll try to go slowly because this gets rather complicated. There would still be three division winners in each league. There would be four instead of two Wild Card teams in each league. OK, so that’s seven teams per league, 14 total and I’ll get to that issue in a minute.
The division winner with the best record in its respective league gets a first-round bye. Then in a televised reality TV stunt, the number two and three division winners chose from which two of the three bottom Wild Card teams they play. The remaining two Wild Card teams play each other. These would all be three-game series.
The next round would be the Division Series and have the top team in each league play the worst team from the three-game series, the remaining two would play each other. The winners advance to the best-of-seven League Championship Series.