Basaball's Playoff System

I confess, I have been a Cubs' fan for as long as I can remember back into my childhood.  This 2015 season has been one of the rare good seasons in Cubs' baseball during my lifetime.  The 97-win season equals the most wins the Cubs have had in a season during my lifetime.  The last time the Cubs won more than 97 games in a season was back in 1945.

For the record, I am writing this prior to the Cubs' playoff game vs. the Pirates, so this post really has nothing to do with the outcome of the game.  The two teams are quite evenly matched, and so I do not have a prediction as to which team will win.  Besides, this post isn't about that; this post is about how the current playoff system could be changed for the better.

In a one-game playoff, anything can happen.  Weather can be a factor.  A home plate umpire can have a wide/narrow/high/low/inconsistent strike zone throughout the game.  A ground ball can take a bad bounce off of a pebble.  A key player can have an illness on the day of the game.  Baseball isn't like pro football where there are only 16 regular season games per year.  Major League Baseball's season has over ten times more games to a season than does the National Football League.  It doesn't seen right that after playing baseball games on an almost daily basis for six months, two teams such as the Pirates and Cubs--who have better records than all but one of the eight MLB playoff teams--should face playoff elimination after just one game.

The first suggestion I'd like to make about the wild card playoff is that it be changed to a best two out of three.  The team with the best record of the two teams would play the first game on the road, then return home for the second and (if needed) third games.

The second change I'd like to suggest is that each league's playoffs should be based primarily on team records while making a division secondary.  The current system doesn't take into account a team's overall body of work throughout a season.  It reminds me of the strike-interrupted 1981 season that ended up being divided into two halves, with the teams with the best record in each half making the playoffs.  That year, the Cincinnati Reds had the best overall record for the entire season, but didn't make the playoffs.  That was just wrong.

A team's overall season record should trump a division title if the team with the division title had a lower winning percentage than a wild card team.  This season, it wouldn't have made a difference in the American League, as all three division winners had better records than both of the wild card teams.  But in the National League, I believe that the playoffs should have been this way: the Western Division winning Los Angeles Dodgers (with a .568 winning percentage for the season) should have been in the first round of the playoffs with home field advantage over the Eastern Division winning New York Mets, who had a .556 winning percentage for the season.  The winner of that round should then face the team with the best winning percentage for the season (the St. Louis Cardinals, at .617), while the Pirates (.605) should have home field advantage against the Cubs (.599), each for a best-of-five series.  If, in the event a division winning team ends with an identical record to a wild card team, the tie breaker would go to the division winner.

As I said, this is being written prior to the Cubs-Pirates game, so regardless the outcome of that game, I hope that in the future these types of changes are implemented.  I believe it would make a team's overall body of work throughout the 162-game season more meaningful than it is with the current system.