Is this where I admit I don’t actually know what the baseball post season bracket or round structure looks like because October baseball is a bedtime story they tell buccos rookies to make them go to bed on time.
Ok I FEEL that 😭
The main weirdness is the Wild Card, which in fairness has changed a lot over the last decade-and-change.
So you recall last time we were in the postseason, a few years back in [redacted] - the Pirates were one of two NL Wild Card contenders, and we were eliminated in a single, one-and-done sudden-death WC game, which was the format at the time. I hated that - not only because we lost, obviously, but also because that one quick sprint never felt In The Spirit of Baseball to me. Apparently MLB corporate agreed, because they just keep fucking with it.
A quick zoom out (you can tl;dr on down to 2022 if you just want the current format)
1993 and earlier: Each league has two divisions. There is no Wild Card team. The two division champs duke it out and the winner goes to the World Series. There are four teams in the postseason.
1994: MLB adds a third division to each league. This creates an odd number of teams going into the postseason, so they add the Wild Card team. The Wild Card team is the one (1) team in the division with the best record below the division winners. (This also necessitates the addition of the Division Series, so that the bracket can be narrowed to two teams for the League Championship Series.) There are eight teams in the - PSYCH! players' strike! no post season!!
1995: The Division Series is actually played for the first time as a best-of-five game.
2012: MLB adds a second Wild Card to each league. The two (2) teams with the best records after the division winners are now in the postseason. This necessitates the addition of the Wild Card Game (a single, sudden-death matchup) and expands the postseason to 10 teams.
2020: MLB announces that the Wild Card will now be a best-of-three Series! Hooray!!!!! Unfortunately, this great news comes with a heaping side of "wait what?” because it also expands the Wild Card again. This postseason includes the normal division winners, the three (3) teams in second place in their divisions, and the two (2) teams with the best record who didn't place first or second in their division. That's a total of 16 teams, baybee!!
2021: MLB presumably sobers up, realizes that 16 teams is too many, and returns to the 2012 model, dropping back to two (2) Wild Card teams per league (and returning to the sudden-death single-game format, boooo). 10 team postseason once again.
2022: MLB celebrates the 10th anniversary of their decision to ruin the Wild Card format by fucking with it yet again.
2022-now: The Wild Card now includes three (3) teams chosen by best record (after the division winners) and is, once again, a three-game series. The postseason now features 12 teams in total.
Seeding is more important in the current format than in years past. It's pretty intuitive:
1st seed: best record in league
2nd seed: second-best division winner
3rd seed: third-best division winner
4th seed: best Wild Card record
5th seed: second-best Wild Card Record
6th seed: bush league assholes who shouldn't be there tbh
I'm kidding. Are you seriously still reading this? I love you.
1st and 2nd seeds automatically get byes into the Division Series (the very thing we created the Wild Card to avoid 👍).
The three-game Wild Card Series is played between two sets of teams: the 4th vs the 5th seed and the 3rd vs the 6th seed.
Those winners move on to the five-game Division Series. 4/5 gets to face the 1st seed, while 3/6 battles the second.
Then - hallelujah - we've finally whittled the postseason back down to two teams per division for the seven-game Championship Series as God intended it, just like in 1993.
You know how it ends! The best of the best duke it out in the best-of-seven Major League Baseball World Series. Somebody wins. There are tears of joy and of sorrow. Manfred shows up and gets boo'd. The dash becomes uninhabitable for a while. Everybody vows that next year will be our year.
Maybe it will.
