andcounting – Obstructed View

Cody vs ACME: Will Cubs Delete Playoff Hopes?

What’s worse than being a Cubs fan with a World Series addiction? How about being a Looney Tunes fan with a hankering for new movies. Today we heard reports Warner Bros. is ~~shelving~~ straight-up deleting the no-longer-forthcoming film Coyote Vs. ACME. Nostalgia? Joy? Hope? Heartbreak? Pursuit of the incessantly elusive prize? Delete it all, say the lucre-sucking suits. Sorry, fans, there’s just not enough money in it.

If it feels familiar to watch billionaires back away from the negotiating table with a “too rich for my blood” sigh, if scrapping a perfectly good plan to save a couple* bucks gives you a nasty case of déjà vu, if you’re tired of, you know, endless greed and late-stage capitalism and the deterioration of all that is good and beautiful in favor of long-term investments in fascism and stuff . . . SORRY, you’re in the wrong news cycle.

After the Cubs greeted the dawn of the offseason by snagging Craig Counsell like a ravenous early bird, they’ve taken more of the procrastinating worm approach to surviving the big-ticket free agent market. Notable Boras clients Cody Bellinger, Matt Chapman, Jordan Montgomery, and reigning NL Cy Young winner Blake Snell are heretofore unemployed. I don’t know that anyone is completely surprised by this; Boras is pretty notorious for holding out as long as necessary for the biggest deal possible.

It’s time to sign Bellinger

But the Cubs are still . . . not good. I know Jed and any MLB front office person loves to find value. Anyone can just pay a ton of money to the obvious free agents, but where’s the fun in that? Well, the fun is in watching good baseball. I would like to watch good players play good baseball. I care more about that than watching GMs make shrewd business decisions to free up cash for super PAC spending sprees. If all the Cubs ever do is get great deals on undervalued players, the endgame becomes paying our favorite players as little as possible.

Is this really what we want? What’s the use in steering clear of an albatross contract like Jason Heyward’s if Jed is going to keep shopping at flea markets and Big Lots anyway? Look, I’m all for finding value. I’m all for keeping an eye to the future. I’m a huge fans of great deals when you can get them. But guess what? There are no more great deals to be had. It’s the last minute. It’s peak season. The police auction is over. Our plane to spring training is about to take off, so it’s time to bite the bullet and pay airport prices for everything we need.

Mr. Right Now

The big coup to get Counsell made it feel like the Cubs were desperate, but as fast as the Cubs had to act to make it happen, that move didn’t really indicate an urgency about 2024. Upgrading at manager is a long-term, improve-the-baseline maneuver. Upgrading the farm system is too. I love what the Cubs have done to put a framework in place that gives them a really high floor moving forward.

But right now, the Cubs can’t be picky about their 2024 upgrades. We can have super high hopes for what the Cubs top prospects might accomplish this season, but the floor for this season (let’s call it The Twenty-Twenty-Floor . . . or not, I can’t tell you what to do) is still awfully low. If they make no significant moves, this team could easily wind up in the 90-loss wilderness. That’s absolutely unacceptable. I’ll take a handful of bad contracts before I put up with another bad season. This team is too rich to fail that badly.

Just do it, Jed Hoyer. Get Bellinger. Get Chapman. Make this team the defensive juggernaut you know it can be. Bargain season is over. Boras season has begun. Pitchers and catchers are about to report; now it’s time to let Passan and Rosenthal report as well.

*hundred million

Don’t give up. Or do, I can’t tell you what to do.

The Cubs are as on the brink of elimination as they can be. That the E hasn’t been posted next to their name in the Wild Card standings entering the penultimate game of the season is bittersweet. This officially official do-or-die moment comes at an earlier point than I could have imagined three weeks ago yet much later than I could have imagined three months ago.

The Cubs need to win twice with two games remaining, AND they need the Marlins to lose thrice with 2.074 games remaining. The Cubs need more to go right in the next two days than has gone right in the last two weeks. As Paul Hollywood told Steph after seeing her twice-baked Stilton Souffle technical challenge in the Season 10 finale of The British Baking Show, it looks bad, you’ve done well, here’s a hug.

But.

Here’s the thing about baseball: when there’s even a small chance, anything can happen. In this case, that small chance of which I speak is the gossamer thread of hope that all 4.074 games go their way. Compared to where the Cubs were as the trade deadline loomed, the prospects are downright cheery.

We have this tendency as Cubs fans . . . hell, as people, to protect ourselves from pain when the likelihood of heartbreak becomes too great. For those of us who are just recently abandoning our Cubs playoff aspirations, it’s too little too late. The pain of this season’s final act has already hit us between the eyes.

But for the team, it ain’t over until it’s over. And it ain’t over. As much as we may want to protect ourselves from further pain by refusing to believe a wildcard berth is possible, it’s still possible. There is reason to hope. There is definitely still reason to play. Is believing in this particular miracle just an exercise in masochism? Probably. But is it worth the risk?

I’ll say this. The role of baseball in our lives wavers between an escape from reality and an inspiration to face it. At this point, the Cubs have failed to provide us an escape. Loss after loss, meltdown after meltdown, setback after setback, and heartbreak after flyball-dropping, lead-blowing heartbreak have made the end of September much more of a metaphor for real life than an escape from it. But at this point, it still serves as an inspiration.

I don’t know if the Cubs have given up yet. It very well may not matter. But I think not giving up is worth it in life and as a fan. At least it can be. Yeah, it does make us vulnerable to little extra shots of pain. But pain? It’s underrated.

No, I can’t tell you what to do. But my suggestion is . . . don’t give up. Maybe this team and this beautiful dumb life will break your heart AGAIN. Or maybe, just maybe, this shit will get ridiculous. In a good way. Again.

Correa to the Giants

We didn’t need a banging garbage can to see this coming. Carlos Correa and the San Francisco Giants have agreed to a 13-year, $350 million deal with a full no-trade clause giving the free-agent shortstop and admitted baseball cheater an $8 million/year pay-cut from last season with the small-market Minnesota Twins. Sucks getting old, doesn’t it?

Plenty of teams, including the Cubs, had expressed interest in Correa and for good reason. But who cares what those reasons were now that the Cubs aren’t getting him? Nico Hoerner, for the time being, is still the Cubs’ shortstop, and Dansby Swanson is still on the Cubs’ radar for moving Nico over to 2B and bolstering this Cubs roster offensively and defensively. Feel free to get your hopes up that the Cubs will do anything significant to improve the team before the season begins or, for that matter, that the team will somehow be in a position at the trade deadline other than the one with which the past two seasons have made Cubs fans uncomfortably familiar: massive sellers. Who knows? Maybe Cody Bellinger can have that rebound season he’s been waiting for, return to MVP form, and the Cubs can trade him for a nice prospect haul in July. That should give much-needed momentum to the Cubs’ “Maybe the year after next” marketing campaign.

For now, I’ll be resigning myself to the likelihood that this team has little intention to improve by leaps and/or bounds instead of by baby steps or being dragged against their will. The big news for today is that the Cubs decided not to sign a player who would do anything to win baseball games, because doing anything to win baseball games isn’t something this franchise believes in anymore.

How to compete for the World Series in 2023

Even though the postseason format will be virtually unchanged, the 2023 MLB regular season is going to look a whole lot different, and the scheduling changes could make the postseason even fairer and more exciting. But the changes in scheduling, coupled with the way the 2022 postseason played out, will inevitably change the way teams from the A’s to the Yankees compete from now into next November.

Balancing the scales (and the MLB schedule)

The 2023 MLB schedule will be the most balanced Major League Baseball has seen in its modern history. Every team will play every team. Each team’s divisional schedule load will drop from 76 to 52, so instead of playing nearly half of their games against divisional opponents, the Cubs will play just shy of 1/3 of their schedule against NL Central foes. We don’t really yet know if that will make their schedule more or less difficult, we just know it will make their slate much more similar to everyone else’s.

In previous years, NL teams in different divisions had just 52% commonality in their schedules, making team-to-team comparisons an apples-to-oranges situation. In 2023, the similarity in schedules within a team’s league skyrockets to 76%. That’s nearly what the previous common-opponent percentage was for divisional teams (84%) which will be 91% in 2023. Within the division, schedules are almost as balanced as possible (we’re talking a difference of a couple games against natural interleague rivals and the fact that no team can play themselves). Within the division, it’s straight-up apples-to-apples, and within the same league, it’s at least comparing different varieties of apples.

Overall, the breakdown for the Cubs 2023schedule is like this: 52 divisional games, 64 interdivisional games within the same league, and 46 interleague games. I’ve seen conflicting reports about how this plays out for teams in general, so I’m committing only to what I’ve counted up for the Cubs. For the sake of watching games being time-zone friendly, it’s a nightmare, but in the quest to correctly rank teams for postseason eligibility, it’s pretty ideal. (We saw the other extreme play out in the Covid-shortened 2020 season in which the NL/AL Central contingent had the most playoff teams and the least postseason wins. . . . Not great.)

So, the schedule is balanced, and the end-of-season results should be pretty fair, so this should make competition pretty fair and the need to stock your team with talent pretty straightforward, right? Just win your division and you’re in . . . right, you guys? Right?!? Well, when you factor in the postseason structure, not so much.

Bye, Bye, Bye

Never in this century has their been a balanced MLB schedule, and never in history has there been an attempt to include every team in both leagues into that balance. And never in the divisional era has winning your division been less significant than it will be in 2023. (This, in my opinion, is a wonderful thing.) Now, winning your division has been equally unimportant in the aforementioned 2020 postseason and in 2022. Why? Because winning your division in each of these seasons, including the upcoming 2023 season, does not guarantee a team entry into the Division Series level of the postseason. One division winner in each league will fail to receive a bye in the best-of-three Wild Card round, and that is a big deal in the postseason.

It’s also a big deal in the regular season (and the preceding offseason as well) as teams decide how much resources they want to commit to competing for a World Series. At this point, it’s a foregone conclusion that in any given season, many teams choose not to compete at all for a World Series. They operate not as competing teams but as MLB franchisers who are moderately-to-perfectly content building a roster with the goal of generating enough fan interest and revenue to keep profits soaring. It’s who they are, it’s what they do.

So before we get too far into discussing how the Cubs or any MLB team will compete for a World Series Championship, I suppose it makes sense to acknowledge that for many teams it’s more of a lottery than a competition. Given the crapshoot nature of the current playoff structure and postseason baseball in general, it’s not insane to view the whole thing as more of a sweepstakes than a competition. This is especially true for teams who don’t get that coveted Wild Card bye.

The 2022 season gave us a perfect example of how costly the risks of competing for the World Series can be. The New York Mets, who absolutely went all-in to make themselves World Series contenders built to succeed in the regular season (which worked, as they won 101 games) and in the postseason (which didn’t work, as they won 0 games) not only didn’t get a first-round bye, they lost the tiebreaker and thus the NL East championship to the Braves.

I’m quite certain MLB owners and front-office execs looked at the Mets (and the Division-Series-losing Dodgers, for that matter) as a cautionary tale. It’s like they bought $300 million in lottery tickets and won $200 million. (It’s not really like that; the Dodgers and Mets are making their respective owners filthier and richer by the day, but you can bet your ass owners and GMs see it as a catastrophic loss.)

So if you’re an MLB front-office person, or the one who pays the bills (or a fan who devotes serious time, money, and emotion into your team’s competitive success), what approach makes sense for competing to win?

Baseball Goals in 2023

Following a season in which spending through the nose worked to varying degrees of postseason success (Phillies and Astros were both top-10 in payroll, but Mets and Dodgers were 1 and 2) and spending below league average led four teams (Cardinals, Mariners, Rays, and Guardians in descending order of payroll) to the playoffs, the ideal strategy doesn’t appear to be a one-size-fits-all approach. But of the 11 most expensive rosters in baseball last year, only three (the Angels and the Sox of both White and Red persuasion) fell short of the postseason. The odds of glory certainly appear much better for the spends than for the spend-nots, but it’s not the only way to go. Here are the main approaches teams are likely to take:

Just Don’t Win

There are going to be 4 to 6 teams who decide heading into the season that winning is dumb. They’re not really worth discussing other than acknowledging they exist on the schedule and that they’ll be responsible for distributing hundreds of wins throughout baseball.

Probable result: 90-100 losses. Best their fans can hope for: not being eliminated from playoff contention until September

The Powerball Approach: Spend chump change and see what happens

Technically, anybody could win it all, and realistically a team that spends very little will probably make the postseason. Guardians fans are probably among the happiest, most hopeful in the league after seeing their team turn the third-lowest payroll (and the worst mascot name) in the league into a few playoff wins and a promising foundation for future success. The Tampa Bay Rays are perennial postseason contenders despite never having a payroll above $43 (citation needed). And, hey, the Phillies were just an 87-win team and they could practically smell the golden pennants on the World Series trophy.

Two caveats on the Phillies. Yes, they were an 87-win team, but they were also an 87-win team who played nearly half their games within the NL East, which means they played nearly a quarter of their games against the Mets and Braves, each of them 101-game winners. Secondly, they paid $256-million+ (4th in all of baseball) for those 87 wins. They definitely don’t belong in this category, tempting as it may be to place them here because of their 2022 win total. They spent like a team trying to be the best in baseball.

One more thing on the low-spending strategy: I care much more about the baseball than the business, and I think that’s pretty universal among fans. No one not in the MLBPA wants the owners to spend more purely for spending’s sake. Many if not most of baseball’s best players are too young to receive the big free-agent paychecks. I’d love as many talented 6-WAR players in their early 20s on the Cubs as possible. But the Cubs have no excuse for leaving gaping holes in their roster; most teams don’t. Many of the players available in free agency match the obvious voids in the lineup and in the rotation. Taking lottery-ticket option for the Cubs in 2023 would be a slap in the face to the fans from whom the Ricketts rake in their billions.

Probable result: 70-80 wins. Best their fans can hope for: a scrappy yet heartbreaking run in the playoffs.

Aim for the Division Crown, Hope for a trophy

A team could, conceivably, appraise the teams in their division and simply try to compete with that group. Let’s say the Cubs’ in-house ZiPS projections put the best NL Central competitor at 88 wins, they could construct an 89-win team and make adjustments at the trade deadline (the expanded playoff format has left MLB with no shortage of deadline sellers).

This is pretty obviously a losing strategy. It’s really just an alternate version of the previous approach. Let’s keep in mind that to have a strong shot at the World Series, a team needs a Wild-Card bye, something no team more than a stone’s throw away from 100 wins had a chance at getting. In a fair league with a balanced schedule and a handful of teams who are flat-out tanking, a team needs to be designed to win 91+ games and have some combination of luck and midseason adjustments to have serious expectations of playing in the divisional round of the playoffs, and still no guarantee.

There very well may be a few teams who reach the postseason who aimed no higher than to win their poor divisions. It’s also certainly not out of the realm of possibility that such a team could win or at least compete in the World Series. It is one possible, uphill, against-the-odds way to get there. But for a top-five revenue team to take this approach when stellar free agents are available would be tantamount to grand larceny. Paying money to watch them play, telling the Ricketts, “It’s okay, you should have more money to keep and do nothing with, here you go,” well, that is a choice one can make. So is bobbing for needles in a barrel of donkey piss, so whatever works.

Probable result: 70-80 wins. Best their fans can hope for: a scrappy yet heartbreaking run in the playoffs.

Build a top-5 team in the league.

If a team approaches this offseason intent on becoming no worse than one of the five best teams in their league, they will probably do so. Injuries will always be a factor, and luck isn’t always a lady, and Tony La Russa could be your manager . . . but the teams on the outside looking in who actually made a concerted organizational effort to be one of the league’s best are few and far between.

My record player is going to keep skipping, but the Cubs have no excuse to ever aim any lower than this. I won’t entertain discussion to the contrary. I’m sure some very intelligent people think otherwise, I just refuse to take such analysis seriously. Won’t do it. The bottom line is, there probably aren’t many more than five teams in either league operating like they intend to win a championship. If you’re not one of them, it’s obvious.

This approach doesn’t guarantee a first-round bye. That’s damn near impossible to do. It certainly won’t guarantee playoff success, because that IS impossible to guarantee. But teams that earnestly try to win at the very least don’t play more than a few meaningless games all year (unless they clinch halfway through September).

Probable outcome: 88-100 wins. Best their fans can hope for: NLDS appearance, NLCS if they’re lucky.

Go for broke. World Series or bust.

Mets. Yankees. Phillies. Dodgers. Braves. San Diego. Houston. Those are the teams that entered last year leaving no doubt they were going for a World Series. The Cardinals, White Sox, Blue Jays, and to some extent even the Rays probably belonged to the previous category. And I guess we should probably have another category labeled “Just mindlessly throw money at the fire” for teams like the Angels and Rangers.

But the teams who said, “Screw it, let’s win now,” made no mystery of their intentions. They continued attempting to improve their rosters until the rulebook forbade any further changes.

Probable outcome: 90-105 wins. Best their fans can hope for: a parade.

I just don’t feel it at all unreasonable to think the Chicago Cubs, whose last World Championship parade drew one of the ten largest gatherings of humanity this planet has ever known, should be going for broke more often than not. In any given season there are two dozen teams at least appearing as though they’d like to win. Last year the Cubs were not one of them. What the literal hell is that about?

Does it make sense to go for broke in the offseason? I mean, maybe not, even from a baseball standpoint. In the comments of a past post, I compared the owners’ silent collusion to a short-track speed skating race where no one really gets going until the last few laps but instead of saving energy they’re saving cash and instead of avoiding the risk of being disqualified or skidding across the ice, they’re just avoiding letting the prices get out of hand. But in the regular season, that metaphor could be comparable in a good way. You can build a pretty decent team and leave yourself some room to improve at the trade deadline. It doesn’t have to result in losing prospects with too much value for it to be effective. That’s pretty close to what the Braves did in 2021 on their way to hoisting the World Series trophy, and I don’t hate it as an overall strategy.

But we’re talking about the Cubs here. They have simply far too much money to ever not be good. Right now, I need to see some evidence they intend to win rather than simply hoping to.

Is MLB’s Postseason Broke? Let’s Fix it Anyway.

Whatever your reason might be for wanting to reformat the postseason or MLB in general, here are a few alternatives to the current system. We’ll start with some that could be incorporated into the league without dramatically altering the way the league is constructed. We’ll propose a few ideas for really blowing everything up later.

As I type this post, the Yankees (99-63) and Guardians (92-70) are warming up for the deciding Game 5 in the ALDS to determine who will get the opportunity to face Houston (106-56), the top seed and the AL team with the best regular season record, in the ALCS. In just a few hours, the Phillies (87-75) and Padres (89-73) meet in Game 1 of the NLCS. Free to enjoy a round of golf, an ugly cry over Ben & Jerry’s, or a vengeful Twitter rant are members and fans of the Rays (86-76), Mariners (90-72), Blue Jays (92-70), Cardinals (93-69), Braves (101-61), Mets (101-61), and Dodgers (111-51), all of whom were escorted out in earlier rounds of the postseason than they hoped they would reach.

(Tired of the rambling? Skip straight to the recipe for MLB postseason success.)

Since we face the possibility of 3 of 4 MLB Championship Series teams coming from the shallow half of the 12-team postseason pool, some people naturally want to beg the question, “Should MLB fix the postseason?” by asking the question, “How should we go about fixing MLB’s postseason?“

Before we get too far into this fun little flurry of fan fiction, let me be clear about one thing: MLB’s postseason is just fine, in my opinion.

The opening Wild Card round? Four games a day for, potentially, three straight days? Sorry not sorry, that turned out AWESOME. Sure, Mets and Cardinals fans would have preferred another outcome but I didn’t mind it. Would a Mets/Dodgers NLDS been fun? Sure, that may have been superior baseball, but in this version, the Mets, Dodgers, and Cardinals all lost. Fix that? Forgive me if I’m slow to jump out of my chair.

(No worries, Goliath fans, during a lengthy break from writing, the Yankees escaped into the ALCS to set up another boring-ass matchup with the Astros.)

From an unbiased standpoint, I’ll just add that baseball isn’t designed to have the best team win in the postseason. Tangotiger explains the nitty gritty of the numbers behind the luck factor, but suffice it to say that for an individual game, baseball is the most luck-dependent of any major American sport. That’s why MLB plays a 162-game schedule, to remove all doubt about who the best teams are. They actually have a pretty nice idea of who the best teams are after 69 games, so the length of the season is probably overkill (this will come into play for a few of our alternative postseason ideas).

Now, I say who the best teams are because the regular season, long as it is, doesn’t necessarily tell us who the very best team is. For one, the rigorous duration of the regular season (and the deadline trade frenzy that occurs midway through this luck-defying marathon) metamorphosizes the field of competition. To take our beloved Cubs, for instance. After the first 69 games (26-43) they had a winning percentage of .376. In their final 69 games (38-31) they had a winning percentage of .551. They were a vastly different team at the end of the season than what they were at the beginning. It’s hard to fathom the difference, given the fact that they purged the best of their bullpen midway through the year, but the team that emerged was a superior squad.

I know what you’re going to say, or at least I know what I want to say, and that’s to point out that the schedule the Cubs played at the beginning is very different than the one they played at the end, and I’m so glad you brought that up. Divisional play in the regular season, not postseason format, is the biggest enemy of determining MLB’s true champion. When the 162-game season is unbalanced, with 76 of those games coming against 4 divisional opponents, it becomes somewhat difficult to compare the apples of NL Central teams’ records with the oranges of the NL West. Thankfully, MLB has already done something about unbalanced schedules. Beginning next season, everybody’s going to play everybody else, and the resulting schedule will level the playing field considerably.

As a result of the adjusted schedule, teams within the same division will have 91% of their games in common, an increase from 84% under the old schedule. Schedules among teams in the same league will feature 76% of common opponents, up from 52% in an unbalanced schedule.
Mark Feinsand, https://www.mlb.com/news/more-interleague-games-on-balanced-schedule

While I’d prefer getting rid of divisions altogether, this is a big deal for the credibility of regular-season records. 123 games in common (versus a 39-game aberration from interdivisional norms) is probably as uniform as we can really expect MLB schedules to be. How that plays out logistically for players and fans remains to be seen, but I like it. More than anything, I like that MLB is fiddling with its seasons (regular and post-).

For all the pearl-clutching traditionalists who bemoan every change, I’ll remind you that racism, collusion, and substance abuse have reigned as some of baseball’s longest-enduring traditions. We can wax nostalgic about the baseball memories we love without being wedded to the sordid system that produced them.

All that said, I think Major League Baseball is in a really good place as far as its April-November schedule is concerned. Is it possible the Mets were the best team in baseball but were foiled by the crazy luck involved in a best-of-three Wild Card Series? Totally. Is it possible the same could be true of the Braves or Dodgers but with a quick exit in a not-all-that-less-luck-dependent best-of-five NLDS? Sure. Is it still possible that the Astros are baseball’s truly best team but will lose to the Yankees who prove to be better, luckier, or bigger cheaters over the course of a still really, really luck-dominated best-of-seven series? Of course. But it’s still a hell of a lot better than the system that left the 1993 Giants (103-59) out of the postseason altogether.

The problems with MLB’s schedule and postseason, summarized

I’m just going to catalog the biggest gripes (with no commentary about their popularity or validity) about the way MLB runs its postseason (and season) now along with some criticisms of past scenarios and proposals for the future:

162 games is too long of a regular season
12 teams is too many teams to make the postseason
Giving teams who obviously weren’t the best team in baseball a chance at winning a postseason crapshoot devalues the regular season
A small playoff field gives lesser teams no incentive to improve
A large playoff field gives better teams no incentive to excel
12 playoff teams is basically the NBA or NHL but somehow worse because look at all these regular season games
This is all a big cash grab
Divisions render the regular season record meaningless
Doing away with divisions would render the regular season unwatchable
Every division has a winner, even if it consists entirely of losers
The regular season is so long that a team in October bears little resemblance to the same team in April
That same team probably goes through a significant, immediate metamorphosis at the trade deadline
A team who has to exhaust their pitching staffs might enter the postseason in terrible shape to compete
A team who coasts at the end of the season and/or gets a WC-round bye might enter the postseason in terrible shape to compete
MLB owners would never go for (insert whatever the best solution would be)
MLB players would never go for (insert whatever the best solution would be)

It ain’t broke, let’s fix it

Old School Wild Card but Best of Seven

Baseball could go back to the era of an 8-team postseason: three division winners and one wild card team per league. No more one-game elimination rounds or best-of-three or even best-of-five series that seem to make the playoffs extra hazardous for 100-game winners. Just let the regular season speak for itself. This format would honor the merits of the marathon accomplishment of each league’s best full-season performance by requiring any challengers at the very least to beat them four times out of seven.

I don’t hate it. I don’t particularly like it because in any given season there is no guarantee whatsoever that every division will include among its members a team that truly deserves to make the postseason more than 11 other teams in their league. The thing I love about a 12- or even 14-team postseason with 3 or 4 Wild Card teams is that it greatly reduces or eliminates the possibility that a team misses the postseason despite being better than one or more of their league’s division winners.

Optional twist: If the best team in either league finishes 10 full games ahead of the would-be wild card team, said wild card would be denied entry into the postseason. And yes, this would have eliminated the Mets in 2022 as well, though I would propose the tiebreaker game would need to reenter the system to prevent something like that from happening were this twist introduced.

Less twisty principle: Insisting that the Divisional Series and League Championship Series be best of seven (at least) can be applied to pretty much any idea, but doing so constrains what will work logistically within the window Mother Nature allots for playing outdoor baseball games in some parts of the country.

The 14-team Option

The 3-game WC, 5-game DS, 7-game LCS, and 7-game WS format can proceed as is with 14 or even 16 teams involved. MLB’s original proposal for postseason expansion was a 14-team option in which only the teams with the very best record in each league received 1st-round byes and there were six opening rounds of Wild Card games. There was also a twist allowing each wild-card-playing divisional winner to choose which team they’d face in the opening round.

I’m glad MLB kept it to 12 teams. Two first-round byes in each league just feels right to me, but I wouldn’t have hated it had each league welcomed another team. Does the added risk of yet two more divisional winners losing it all because of back-to-back losses outweigh the plus of seeing two more fanbases have a little bit more baseball to watch in October? Probably not. But I contend that the advantage of hosting all three games at the divisional winner’s (or top Wild Card’s) home field is significant enough to make it not a ridiculous risk.

Optional Twist: Give the divisional winners a 1-0 advantage to begin the Wild Card Series to make quick upsets that much less likely. My main objection is puke. No advantage should include runs that never actually scored or games that never actually took place.

Offseason Twist: One proposal was to further incentivize teams to actually try to win their divisions (as opposed to just coasting into the postseason because it’s all a big crapshoot anyway) was to award the each league’s best regular-season team with more crap to shoot, ie an entry in the lottery for the top six picks in the next year’s draft. It’s an interesting way of compensating a team for having a postseason that’s riskier than their record would otherwise promise. I actually kind of like the idea of awarding it not to the team with the best record but to teams ejected prematurely from the postseason. If you win your division but lose in the Wild Card Series, you get entered along with the 16 nonplayoff teams in that lottery.

Round Robin

The Wild Card games and Divisional Series typically take about 10 games to complete. You could eliminate just as many teams with even more games played by having a round-robin tournament in each league. If 6 teams from each league participated, every team could play the other five teams twice apiece, 10 games in 12 days. (You could make this work with any number of teams involved.) Top two teams advance to the LCS with tiebreaker games as needed.

This is my baby. I don’t think it’s ever going to happen in this or any of the other iterations suggested because no major American sports team does it. We’ve probably played in a Little League, softball, or volleyball tournament with a round robin starter, and that whole World Cup event has a similar feature, but baseball? Professional baseball? Yes, I think it would be great. You could weight home-team advantage, and there would be two weeks with 4-6 games every day.

Or, you could get a lot more creative with it if you also changed up the regular season. Here are some fun ways to do that and to open up the postseason to a whole new world of exciting possibilities.

Shorten the Season

A 162-game season constrains our creativity quite a bit, but the postseason could be a lot more entertaining (without compromising the meritocracy with which it crowns its champions) if they shortened the nonpostseason to 144 games or fewer.

Or it could be boring

Keep everything as it currently is but make all the series longer. 5- (or 7-) game WC. 7-game DS. 7-game LCS. 7-game WS. This gets us into NBA and NHL territory, so whatever. This somewhat reduces the crapshoot effect, but not by as much as everyone wants. Luck is still a bigger factor in baseball than it is in other sports, so slightly longer series would still produce a lot of underdog victories. I love that, but a lot of current Dodgers fans and 1990s Braves fans really super hate it. Cleveland Indians fans would like to know why none of the lucky roads lead to Cleveland, though now that I put it like that they totally get it.

Round Robin + 7-Game LDS +7-Game LCS + 7-Game WS

Ok, no, this is my baby. In this setup, every team makes the postseason. Each division winner will “host” a pool of five teams. They select the teams that will be in their respective pools, and those five teams play each other three times apiece. The team with the best regular-season record in each league automatically advances along with the top team in each pool (if the best regular-season team also wins their pool, the second-place team with the best record advances as well) but the team records in the opening round would determine seeding and home-field advantage for the LDS, LCS, and World Series with regular-season record being the tiebreaker in every case. (e.g. if every team went 6-6 in the Opening Round Robin, the teams with the best regular-season records would advance, seeded according to those records.)

I like this system because it a) rewards the team in the AL and NL achieving the best regular-season records; b) rewards the teams who have become the best at the end of the season; c) allows the fans of even the crappiest teams to enjoy a slight window of hope and optimism.

Optional twist: if a division winner doesn’t win their pool, the winner of the pool must defeat them in a one-game playoff to advance to the LDS, essentially giving all division winners a baker’s dozen worth of games to salvage their place in the playoffs.

Split the Season

Another way to improve obliterate the current postseason format would be to cut the season in half (or so). Since we know as few as 69 games would give us a pretty accurate understanding of who the better teams are, MLB could play an 81-game season and then take things in a few different directions to determine how to arrive at a champion.

1981 Two-Halves Scenario

A strike midway through the 1981 MLB season forced baseball to get creative with their postseason. (This was the first year I knew what baseball was, so it might have something to do with my obsession with constantly changing the playoff structure.) At that time there were just two divisions in each league. When play resumed after the strike, they just decided to zero out everyone’s records and start a second half. The division winners from the first half squared off against their second-half counterparts in an 8-team playoff. The Division Series and the League Championship Series were both best-of-five. (As luck would have it, the NL West first-half champion Dodgers won the World Series that year despite finishing in 4th place and just a game above .500 in the second half.)

MLB could make that a thing and simply add a first-round bye to the two teams in each league with the best overall record. This approach would probably change the trade deadline in a really weird way in that teams who secured a place in the postseason wouldn’t have to try to improve themselves at all in the second half and teams who lost damn near every single game wouldn’t have to become sellers and could become buyers in an attempt for second-half glory. MLB owners are really good at figuring out how to get the greatest benefit out of the least investments with the shittiest intentions and lousiest ethics imaginable, so it would be really fun to watch them compete at being super sleazy and see how that would affect the way their teams compete on the baseball field.

Soccer Style

Full disclosure: 80% of what I know about professional soccer I learned from Ted Lasso. But one way MLB could shake things up considerably would be to implement a relegation of sorts at some point during the season. There are too many variations within this idea to discuss them broadly, at least not if I plan to finish this post by the end of the World Series. So I’ll propose just one with an optional twist.

One hundred games or so into the regular season would be, for lack of a better word, relegation. At that point, the National League would become the premier-ish league and the American League would become the more championesque variety. To preserve geographic divisions, you’d basically arrange the ten teams from each divisional alignment (the 10 West, 10 Central, 10 East teams from both leagues) by record, and the five best would become the new National League and the five worst would become the new American League. The rest of the schedule would proceed as normal, only the standings and league assignments would be different. The three NL division champions and five wild cards would play an eight-team playoff with three best-of-seven rounds.

Optional Twist: The relegated American League could have a playoff of their own to determine an AL Champion that would enter the NL playoff tree as a wild card.

Sorry, One More Optional Twist: The new league arrangements could carry over into the next season with the unbalanced divisional schedules assigned accordingly.

Okay, I’m sure there are more possibilities, but I’ve exhausted my capacity for writing about them and, I’m sure, your capacity for reading about them without arguing. So, let’s have it. Rip all these to shreds and let us know what the real best regular season/postseason setup would be.

Who Owns the Cubs?

Have we gotten to the bottom of this question, yet? Six years into its history (somehow that bit of canon came from the first half of its virtual existence), the Orthodox Church Of Cubs Baseball conducted an interview with the Chairman/Executive Chairman/Not Really the CEO/Owner-kind-of of the Cubs, Tom Ricketts. Part I of this wide-ranging interview was devoted exclusively to the questions of who owns the Cubs and how Cubs ownership defined a “mister.”

The second question is too ethereal to pursue effectively, so I won’t address it at all. But I’m pretty sure I have a definitive answer to the first, slightly less mysterious query about who owns the Cubs:

It ain’t us.

If Cubs fans collectively owned the Cubs, we never would have let Len Kasper depart to the White Sox radio booth. Ok, maybe he still would have left to pursue his desire to broadcast games on the radio, something he’d get to do with the Cubs only during Spring Training or the occasional Pat Hughes off day coinciding with a nationally preemptive telecast. Neither of those are exactly the World Series calibre game Kasper is hoping to be a part of.

Lots of discussion has swirled around Marquee’s role in Kasper’s decision to leave, but Kasper has pretty much bent over backward to dismiss such rumors. Still, Marquee isn’t the Cubscentric Network Cubs fans would have chosen if it were our call, is it? Assuming OV comments represent pretty much the entirety of Cubs fans’ opinions (an ironclad assumption if ever there was one), we recognize Marquee as another pawn in the ever-expanding Sinclair Chessboard of Fascism. That might not track with the prevailing worldview of OV or Cubs Twitter or the Cubs broadcast team or any other subset of Cubs fans, but it certainly doesn’t ruffle the feathers of the people who actually own the Cubs.

And what about the players rumored to join Kasper and Kyle Schwarber on the next El out of Wrigley? Certainly if Cubs fans owned the team, Kris Bryant and Javier Báez would never set a toe on the trade block. Okay, that’s probably the least true thing so far in this already pretty suspect diatribe, so it’s really just my opinion at its most sentimental (and that’s where I’m heading with this nonsense).

If I owned the Cubs, Schwarber, Bryant, and Báez would probably be permanent fixtures at this point. Yeah, that’s dumb from a baseball perspective. No argument here. But they were key components in THE World Series. I wouldn’t just do everything I could to keep them on the team, I’d do everything I could to make leaving the team seem like a stupid, unthinkable notion. I’d want the Cubs franchise to be as pure and true to the essence of that 2016 vibe that seeing the trademark Cubs red and blue would give any Cubs fan the same chills we all get any time we see a routine grounder to Bryant.

That would be my goal: do everything possible to make every rendition of the team feel as 2015-2016 for as long as I could keep the illusion going. Winning baseball would be a component of that but not more important than that.

I fully expect to part ways with you at that last point. I fully expect most fans to prioritize winning over just about everything else. I don’t fault anyone for adopting that mindset. But here’s why I call this approach the most Cubs-fan way to run the team.

Most of us are Cubs fans for some reason that isn’t super logical. Being from Chicago. Being from the North Side. Rebelling against our White-Sox-or-Cardinals-loving families. Sammy. WGN. Ryne Sandberg’s stoic manliness. Kris Bryant’s eyes. Ivy. Who the hell knows? As flimsy as the origin stories of our fandom might be, we typically need some vaguely realistic remnant of that root connection to remain. Right? There’s some threshold of identity or integrity that has to be there for us to keep liking the team.

If the team moved to Florida and changed its name to the Trump Nuts, you’d find a new team, yeah? I would. If they left Wrigley, some people would. If they lost in humiliating fashion year after year for a century, no big deal. But if they changed the team colors to mustard yellow and forest green, I’d have a lot of thinking to do.

So what if they got rid of the guy who made the final assist in Game 7? What if they traded away the most fun player (and best tagger, bar none) that you ever watched? What if the guy who parked a baseball on the right field scoreboard just walked away without a contract? What if the TV play-by-play guy (and quite possible the best one this team has ever had) crossed town for a lesser gig? What if they just got really boring and disappointing? Would you find a new team then?

Maybe. But what if the changes in the team weren’t all that bad, just different? What if the team-owned network got a bit vanilla? What if the team owners, despite being fascist pigs, figured out a way to win consistently with players who were just really good (even if a few of them turn out to be replacement-level humans)? What if every connection you felt to the World Series champs, beside the team name, is gone?

What if the baseball improved, but the brand got really bland? Would you still be a Cubs fan?

I ask this question, because it appears that may be the best a Cubs fan can really hope for. This franchise is getting a reboot. The Marquee network is not going to be good on any sentimental, genuinely Cub level. It’s just not. The team itself is not going to resemble the personality or the narrative of 2016 AND be good at baseball at the same time.

The fanbase is going to start looking pretty generic: that’s what Sinclair outlets foster. Being a Cubs fan isn’t going to mean what it did whenever it meant when you became one. The team will probably be good again eventually (not soon). The Cubs will never again be lovable losers. They’re not star-driven, or won’t be for long.

I mean, if and when Kris Bryant leaves, the Cubs won’t get much back for him. Prospects are at an absolute premium in this year that paying $8 million for Kyle Schwarber is too steep a gamble. The owners mostly lost money last year. The beginning of the season will be delayed. They may lose money again this year. The small teams have no revenue sharing boosts to help pay their bills. NOBODY wants to spend. Free agents will be a bargain and rookies will be the MLB bumper crop. The only thing the Cubs can really hope to get for Bryant is salary relief.

Can you imagine what it’s going to feel like when Kris Bryant walks away from this team and the Cubs get nobody interesting back? Or one year’s worth of some other struggling superstar?

So this is my point: what happens this offseason and in 2021 is almost certainly going to feel completely antithetical to what you want this team to look like. It will never be more obvious that we don’t own this franchise. This is going to suck. This team is going to suck.

What if the exact opposite of everything you want to happen plays out in the next six months? Will you still be a Cubs fan?

I probably will. I’m an idiot. But my expectations are gone. If Javy goes? Wherever he winds up just may be my new team.

Speaking of weird seasons

Ron Cey was a Dodger than a Cub but always a Penguin — Ron Cey, one of 52ish World Series co-MVPs in what was, up until now, the weirdest season in MLB history

This was originally going to be a preachy post about how MLB owners are the ones who should be playing for the love of the game, since they’re the ones playing the sport we actually love most. (I’m going out on a limb assuming few of us actually play baseball but we all like to play baseball owner, arguing about what the rules should be, how the postseason should be structured, and constructing our ideal teams for hours on end.)

But then I realized most of our reader probably already leans pretty heavily in favor of the labor side of these negotiations, so I scrapped it.

This in-the-balance season just kind of hanging around waiting to be decided upon did get me to thinking about 1981, the year a strike interrupted the MLB season and ended up splitting it into two mini-seasons.

The strike nixed games after June 12 through the end of July, leaving the country baseball-less until an August 9 All Star Game and a 1981 Part Deux commencing August 10.

Much like this season, should it happen, is likely to do, that ushered in an extra round of playoffs that postseason. Disregarding the season totals, the leader in each division (each league had an East and West division at that point) as of June 12 faced the division leaders of the second half in an opening round.

As a result, the two NL teams with the best overall record in the 1981 season, the Reds and the Cardinals, both failed to make the playoffs. The Reds actually finished with the best record in baseball, finishing second in both half seasons (just a half game out of first behind the Dodgers who had won, and played, just one more game than the Redlegs).

So, it had been a few months. There’s your post, reader. See you in September.

The Cubs’ Legacy of Bad Baseball Now Extends to Bad TV Business

The Cubs just signed a deal to include the Marquee Sports Network on Hulu’s Hulu+Live option inside the Cubs’ broadcast market. That, along with the addition of AT&T NOW, marks basically the first sign of hope for Cubs fans who have cut the cord on cable.

But most of those whose cords remain solidly intact use Xfinity and are still without answers on when they can expect to see the Cubs Fiasco Channel on their screens. Cubs head of screwing up business operations, Crane Kenney, is presumably the imbecile responsible for negotiating deals with cable networks, and he has failed to get one done as of 3+ days before the first spring training game broadcast.

It won’t get done in time. There won’t be a stand-alone streaming option (like Disney+, HBO NOW, ESPN+, you know the drill because this is 2020 and you’re not an idiot because you aren’t Crane Kenney unless someone is reading this aloud to you).

So much revenue is just sitting around. I know that’s no big deal because the Cubs have cash literally flowing out their nostrils. But during an offseason in which so many great players were so very ungettable for the poor billionaires club, it would have been nice to have some forward-thinking . . . or even current-thinking resident of the 21st century come up with a plan to actually make money on this Cubs TV network.

It’s so disappointing. The reason the Cubs have so many fans has very little to do with their historically pathetic ability to play baseball and so much to do with their ingenuity in offering their games on TV nationwide when no one else was doing that. It’s hard to believe they’ve become such a backward-minded waste of a franchise even in the one area they used to absolutely lead the world in: broadcasting.

But here we are. I can’t believe more Cubs fans aren’t way more furious about it.

Daily Shrug Random Hot Stove Open Thread Edition

Eh. 2016 wasn’t that long ago. Let’s not get all worked up over winning all the time.

David Ross is rumored to be the new Cubs manager, according to anonymous sources attending the press conference introducing him as the new Cubs manager.

Lester Strode is out as bullpen coach, which bothers Bruce Miles. Word is he was offered a different position with the team.

You should probably take a drink every time you shrug while reading Cubs news.

Cole Hamels is gone.

Anthony Rizzo is not.

Yu Darvish is not.

The last surprising development in Cubs world was probably the signing of Craig Kimbrel, which worked out unsurprisingly well. So I’m just going to go ahead and stop this nonsense.

After one more tidbit:

Javy was born. (Don’t shrug at that. You can still drink to that, though.)

The Gospel According to Joe (or How to Be a Cubs Fan in the Maddon Era)

It's the problem we always wanted to have, but now that it's here, the challenge of handling success has many Cubs fans and media members perplexed. As Cubs fans, we don't have a lot of experience in rational optimism or success when it comes to baseball, at least. (Some of us have managed to elude the perils of success in all of life's aspects, but that's another issue altogether. Or is it? . . .)

On more than a few occasions in the past few weeks, I've heard people wonder aloud about what we should consider a disappointment in 2016. Can we be satisfied with anything less than a World Series trophy? To find answers to this and all of life's great mysteries, may I point us all in the direction of a wellspring of wisdom from which Cubdom should freely and liberally drink: the words of Joe Maddon.

(Before I get too far into this, I want to clarify something. This all might come across as tongue-in-cheek, but I assure you, I write every word with the utmost sincerity.)

I know everyone who cheers for the Cubs appreciates having Joe Maddon as manager because of the winning culture he brings everywhere he goes. Winning baseball is the renovation to Wrigley Field for which I'm most thankful, but I have come to appreciate Maddon's contributions beyond the game of baseball. When I listen to Joe Maddon talk, I want to be a better person and to live a better life. And he makes me feel like it's more than just a distant possibility. Joe inspires and energizes at a level very few people can. I truly believe that even if he knew nothing about baseball, Maddon's enthusiasm and leadership would be worth 2.5 WAR. But I digress.

My point in all this is that Joe Maddon's wisdom about winning baseball also applies quite well to being a fan of the team he manages. Allow me to offer up a few examples:

The thing I want our guys to understand is the process is fearless. When you want to become outcome-oriented, that's where you can really run into some trouble. If we can just keep our guys focused on the process of the day, there's no fear in that. If we can think in those ways, in those terms, we're going to do pretty well.

This is the answer to all the questions about where the Cubs need to finish to avoid making 2016 a disappointment. In short, looking at the season with questions like that in mind is a terrible way to approach the season or any one game for that matter. I'll put it another way: I would consider 2016 a failure if the Cubs were to stray from what Maddon calls the "relentless execution of fundamentals and technique." But as long as the Cubs remain focus on playing good baseball, I'll continue to enjoy watching them do so. The wins and postseason glory will come, but at this point in the journey to October, I'll enjoy the process being executed by Maddon and co. Worrying about postseason outcomes at this point is pretty futile. That said . . .

It's all about setting your standards, your goals, high, because the problem, if you don't set them high, is you might actually hit your mark. We need to set our mark high, absolutely. I'm going to talk playoffs. I'm going to talk World Series. This year. I am. I promise you. And I'm going to believe it.

Maddon has said a lot about expectations being a positive word since the popular predictions for the Cubs have risen to more closely resemble the ones Joe had at his opening press conference. But the quote above is the one I will always remember. At the time, in that one should-have-been-frivolous press conference, Joe Maddon made a believer out of me. Do you remember what went through your head when he said that? I do. Something to the effect of, "Holy shit, there's hope. For the Cubs. For me. For the world and future generations."

So to the people expecting a World Series this year, I say (and I believe Joe does too) keep thinking that way. Make a championship your goal, make it your standard, make it the baseline expectation. Whatever. Just keep in mind that there's a difference between expecting to win at all and worrying about how disappointed you might be if you don't. If the Cubs do exactly what they did last year, I'll enjoy the hell out of it. I mean, come on, that's so fun to watch. Isn't that the point? Okay, yes, I hear you. Dual points, fun and championships.

Never permit the pressure to exceed the pleasure.

I'm sure we've all had this tattooed on our foreheads by now, so I won't belabor the point. I'll just say this: if it's important for the players to hold fast to that premise, players whose multi-million-dollar job it is to play an extremely difficult sport in the face of immense fan and media and internal pressure, it should be equal parts important and easy for us to keep it in mind as well. It's baseball. The fun exceeds the pain and disappointment. #thingsthatareeasytosayinfebruary

One round's on me. Shot and a beer.

Don't ever forget this, Cubs fans. Love it. Live it. Repeat.

Go Cubs.