Snyder's Soapbox: Please, stop expanding the MLB playoffs

Welcome to Snyder's Soapbox! Here, I pontificate about matters related to Major League Baseball on a weekly basis. Some of the topics will be pressing matters, some might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and most will be somewhere in between. The good thing about this website is that it's free, and you are allowed to click away. If you stay, you'll get smarter, though. That's a money-back guarantee. Let's get to it.

In major professional sports in North America, there are four leagues with at least 30 teams: the NBA, NFL, NHL and this, our Major League Baseball. MLB has the most exclusive playoff field. 

• MLB: 12 of 30 teams (40%)
• NFL: 14 of 32 teams (43.75%)
• NHL: 16 of 32 teams (50%)
• NBA: 16 of 30 teams (53.3%)

Now, the NBA also has four extra teams taking part in Play-in games, but we don't need to bother there. The point is that MLB has the most difficult league in terms of making the playoffs. And I'd still argue it's too easy. 

Just look at the percentages. Aren't the playoffs supposed to feature games of the very best teams in order to determine the champion for the season? In what field is the top 40% of anything considered the cream of the proverbial crop? Are colleges flocking to recruit students ranking between the 35th and 40th percentile? If you were ranked in the 38th percentile in your sales job, would you think you deserve an award? 

In Major League Baseball, the 83-win Reds made the playoffs last season. In 2024, two 86-win teams earned postseason berths. In 2023, two 84-win teams made the postseason and one of them ended up in the World Series. 

And yet, people are still clamoring for an expanded playoff field. Most of the time, it's based on the nonsense theory that the bye is bad for the best teams. If we expanded to eight teams per league, there wouldn't be any byes! 

Yeah, I've got news for those people and it's not good. It is, in fact, very bad. It's a recipe for disaster because at some point, we'd end up seeing a team with a losing record topped a 100+ win team in the first round. 

This kind of theater is appreciated in other sports. Hell, I think it's fun when a 16-seed gives the 1-seed a run for its money in the NCAA basketball tournament because it's a spectacle of an event. 

This is not the best way to determine who the actual best team is, though, especially not in baseball, where the worst team in the league can take a small-sample series over the best team. 

A lot of this discussion about the bye being "no fair" for the bye teams happened after the 2023 Braves were bounced in their first series after a 104-win regular season. They lost because of the bye, right? Did those people forget they were swept by the Marlins in the middle of September or lost a series to the 71-win Cardinals earlier that month? 

Where baseball is an outlier is that the sport is set up to determine the best team over monstrously huge samples of play. The most important position on the field at any given time is the pitcher and teams rotate through four to six starting pitchers at different points in the schedule. This would be like NFL teams rotating quarterbacks. 

There are some fans hardcore enough to say MLB never should have changed the format from when each league just sent the team with the best regular-season record straight to the World Series. Some even say there shouldn't even be playoffs and the best record should be the champion because of the marathon nature of the sport. 

I'm not that hardcore. The playoffs are incredible theater.

Further, I'm under no delusion that MLB is ever going to eliminate playoff teams from the field. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. Too many fan bases are involved in the playoff race. We've nearly completed four of our six months this season and there are only six teams that could be truly called non-contenders right now. Overall, that's good for the game. More fan bases are hanging around longer. 

There are also an awful lot of teams that don't belong in the playoff conversation. Some will weed themselves out. We'll get one or two in the playoffs that definitely don't belong, though, and let's hope they don't end up making a deep run. A battle between two 100-win titans in the World Series is exponentially better for the game than an 84-win team losing in five games to a 90-win team. 

If the season ended today, the 2026 playoffs would be packed with a litany of mediocre teams as we stare down the barrel of a CBA battle this coming offseason. I bring up the latter because, generally, both sides like more playoff teams. Owners like an easier chance at a postseason attendance bump, not to mention late-season attendance surges when the playoff race really heats up. Players like better chances at playing in the postseason, too (and the playoff shares that come with it). 

Let's hope the league and the MLBPA are too tied up with other matters this coming offseason. We have plenty of playoff teams. We don't need more to further dilute an already-too-diluted field.