Please forgive me if I’m curt. I can only go over this so many times without starting to think The Internet™ is not internalizing my lessons about applying the NIT to other sports. It’s almost as though only a handful of people are reading my NIT blog.
Céspedes Family BBQ, a dual-souled entity I don’t fully understand but nonetheless generally support (we are on board with the mops, fellas), tweeted the following piece of inanity today:
Umm, excuse me, two-souled beast. The Rockies? They’d be turning down a CBI bid.
The upper and lower bounds for NIT at-larges in men’s college basketball ranges from roughly the 87th percentile of teams (in perception, not quality—the winner is often much closer to the 93rd percentile) to the 81st percentile of teams. In baseball, that means your fourth-best team would be the top seed and your sixth-best team would be the final at-large, with one automatic bid you’d have to figure out the rules for (look, there’s a reason there isn’t an MLB NIT—you can’t just go around throwing NIT’s everywhere; it’s special).
So, the real MLB NIT? Well, besides the one in our hearts, it’d be:
Milwaukee vs. Atlanta (let’s say you give division champions automatic bids)
Houston vs. Chicago-AL
Remarkably, yes, this is something that’s happening. These are two of the four division series. The MLB NIT, in a sense, already exists. And the Red Sox would not qualify.
