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Wednesday, February 23, 2011
How many teams in MLB playoffs?
As you know, the MLB 162-game regular season schedule is equivalent to the NHL 82-game schedule in terms of how the final standings reflect the true talent of their teams.
Since MLB has never tested various forms of playoffs in terms of having “not enough” or “too much” teams, I asked NHL fans what they think. And their preference is to have 12 teams (out of 30) to make the playoffs.
The likely structure would be to give the top 4 teams a bye, and the next 8 teams play in an elimination round. Though I didn’t ask the question, it also seems unlikely that they’d want the elimination round to be a best-of-7 that could last 10-14 days. Presumably a one-week bye is the most that would be supported, and so a best-of-5, with limited off days would be the likely alternative (and extra bonus for the bye teams). Anyway, this means that the top 4 teams need to win 12 games for the Cup, and the bottom 8 teams need to win probably 15 games.
Would this apply directly to MLB? Now, don’t forget that one NHL game tells you as much as two MLB games. Therefore, in order to have 12 teams make the MLB playoffs, you would need the teams to win 24 (or 30) games for the World Series. This basically is to counteract the extra luck that you have in MLB compared to NHL. In order to reduce this aspect of luck, you need to reduce the number of teams in MLB playoffs.
If we treat the NHL 12-team as the model, then I suspect an 8-team playoff (12 wins for the Cup) is still too many teams (or too few games).
The NHL and MLB regular seasons each last six months. The NHL playoffs with 12 teams would last up to 7 weeks, compared to the 4-5 weeks that the MLB playoffs currently run. In order to get to the ideal point, you either need to make each playoff series a best of 9 (or even best of 11) to reduce the luck, or you need to have less than 8 teams make the playoffs.
I’m throwing the challenge out there. If the proposed NHL scenario of 12 teams is ideal (as outlined above), how often will the top 2 regular season teams win the Stanley Cup? In order to match that, what kind of MLB playoff scenario do you need (changing the number of teams and/or number of games)?
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