THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I don’t know what the criteria is for a floor for this number, but shouldn’t the ceiling be at least as low so that no more than 50% of the teams reach?

I’d prefer 8 or 12 total teams.

NBA has 16 in a league of 30, FWIW

I am definitely not talking about NBA, just to be clear.  I’ll make my point as it relates to MLB after a few more votes.

There’s no reason for the 50% rule.  In the old days, 4 of 6 teams and 12 of 17 teams made the playoffs in the NHL.  6 of 8 or 9 of CFL teams made the playoffs.

Yes, I know there’s an historic precedent. That doesn’t mean it was the right thing to do. If this poll were for a 6 team, 8 team, 9 team or 17 team league, my answers would be no higher than 2, 4, 4 or 8 respectively.

My organizing principle: if you’re going to allow a team a chance at a title/cup/championship that has a worse record than a majority of the remaining teams, you might as well just let everyone play in a full-participation seeded tourney.

Jesse, I was only responding to your point that you needed a ceiling.  I understand your preference is for a ceiling, but it’s not clear to me that there should be a ceiling as a matter of opinion.

The World Cup for example had a setup for example where more than half the teams made the playoffs.  Same thing for Olympic hockey.

I voted for all 30. I just love watching playoff hockey - something about having best of x series against a team instead of just a bunch of random games makes it more enjoyable to watch. While I don’t usually watch regular season games other than my team (unfortunately, the Leafs), I watch every playoff game I have a chance to regardless of who’s playing.

Obviously playing a 82 game regular season and then having everyone make the playoffs is ridiculous. My ideal scenario would be something like a 62 game regular season (expand to 32 teams everyone plays each other team twice), and then have 5 playoff rounds, maybe best of 7 first and second round, best of 9 3rd and 4th, and then best of 11 final.

I know this would never happen, but anything that reduces the number of regular season games and increases the number of playoff games works for me.