Joe’s Notes: MLB’s Expanded Playoffs Are Doing What Was Promised

This is only the second year of Major League Baseball’s 12-team playoff format, and in an important sense, early returns are great. Not only did the Phillies make the World Series last year as the 6-seed (previously not a playoff team), but teams are trying to get that 6-seed themselves in 2023. We will come back to this in a moment.

The NBA has a problem right now with tanking. This problem has a few flavors, but one of them concerns the NBA’s playoff format: This season, the Mavericks appeared to intentionally try to lose in order to miss the playoffs, preferring an extra draft pick and what that pick would mean for future title chances over an active chance at a present title. In short, the NBA accidentally incentivized not making the playoffs.

A parallel occurrence was a risk for MLB when they jumped to twelve teams in their postseason, and while there are various angles to expansion, the purported purpose of the 12-team format at its outset was to actively discourage tanking. Television revenue was, of course, the real motive, but what MLB pitched to its fans was that adding a playoff team would increase the number of teams trying to make the playoffs each season. By expanding the field, MLB said, it would make more teams try to win, which is something fans of most sports want. Generally, we want to see teams trying to win.

Many, myself included, were skeptical of this notion, and even feared that the idea could backfire. The expansion brought with it a setup where teams who do make the playoffs face tougher slates than before if they don’t finish in their league’s top two, meaning while playoff opportunities certainly increased with the change, the impact on the affected teams’ actual probability of a title remains in question. To use an example: The Cubs have a better chance of making the playoffs this year than they would have with the 2021 format. Their World Series chance is comparable, though, and is pretty darn close to zero.

So far, the skeptics have been wrong. MLB seems to have gotten it right, or at least gotten lucky. Of the nine teams currently looking at playoff probabilities between 10% and 40% on FanGraphs, more were buyers these last few days than sellers. The Padres, Cubs, Angels, Yankees, and Diamondbacks (for the most part) bought. The Red Sox held. The Mariners and Guardians sold, but not aggressively, and did a little buying at the same time. Of the nine, only the Mets really gave up on their season. That’s a good ratio.

Expanding the experiment to include last year, we do see that the Red Sox and Giants—the only two teams within that 10%–40% range at this point—did mostly sell, meaning we’re looking at a split field overall: Five buyers, one holder, five sellers. But last year was only the first of the system, and if approaches change over time, early indications are they’re pointing towards teams stepping up. What’s more, the buyers—especially the Padres, Angels, and Cubs—have made dramatic decisions to buy, while we aren’t seeing anyone but the Mets dramatically back down, and that was done without much complaint. Overall? Teams in this nebulous window seem to think the 6-seed (or the 3-seed, for those chasing a Central Division title) is worth pursuing. That’s good for the game.

One last thought on why that might be, and then I’m sure we’ll have more on the trade deadline tomorrow: We alluded to this a couple weeks ago, but one of the great things about baseball is that playoff berths have value in and of themselves. In the NBA, there isn’t a whole lot gained for an 8-seed by getting a chance to play a 1-seed. This isn’t a great time to point that out, given what the Heat just did, but we can all agree that the Heat were a unique case and are a unique franchise. In baseball, though, just getting to October is valuable to franchises, and not only because of ticket sales if they get home games or because of those percentage points of chances at championships adding up over time. In baseball, the postseason is so good a product that any sort of participation in it is a victory in and of itself. This isn’t unique to baseball—I’d say hockey, football, and college basketball have it from the earliest rounds as well—but it’s a great aspect of the game, and it’s one that’s worth appreciating this time of year, especially as we just saw a whole lot of teams decide to push their chips into the pot.

The Pac-12 Offer Sounds Worse Than We Guessed

Per reports from multiple outlets, the Pac-12 TV deal brought to schools today is mostly centered around broadcasting through Apple TV, and rather than include a tidy revenue number for each school, it has various potential payouts tied to subscription numbers. It has not been met with positive reactions in the press, and the meeting reportedly ended without the deal being accepted.

To be honest, this is worse than I expected. I believed that the Pac-12 could get its schools a revenue number similar to that of the Big 12, thinking that even if the average Pac-12 school’s national interest level was slightly lower than that of the average Big 12 school, someone like Apple would be willing to overpay slightly in order to break into the college football world. It does not sound like that happened, and if there’s a shred of truth in George Kliavkoff and his Pac-12 leakers’ claims that the number would be comparable to the Big 12’s, it’s that the deal could end up being great financially if it were to lead a lot of new subscribers to Apple TV. Unfortunately, indications from the Pac-12 Networks experiment are that the subscribers number will not be high, and the Pac-12 Networks were launched when UCLA and USC were still in the league.

What happens next? If it’s true that the Big 12 can only award three more spots before it has to renegotiate its deals with ESPN and FOX, and if it’s true that ESPN and/or FOX is pressuring the Big 12 to only add one more school, and if it’s further true that no conference out there is interested in throwing lifelines to Pac-12 schools for the sake of throwing lifelines, the following possibilities might be on the table:

• The ACC could get involved, and having already opened the door to unequal revenue sharing, could maybe more easily extract major financial concessions in exchange for giving some Pac-12 schools a lifeboat.
• The Big 12 and its broadcast partners could renegotiate their deal, working together to identify which Pac-12 schools would raise the revenue per school number, which would not, and invite the schools which would raise it.
• The Big Ten or the SEC could surprise and invite two or more schools to join, again possibly at a steep price.
• Whatever remains of the Pac-12 could accept the Apple deal.
• Now that the deal is somewhat public, another broadcaster could enter the negotiations and save the Pac-12’s ass. Even Nickelodeon is at least on basic cable, and Nickelodeon does broadcast some football.

If everyone is looking out for their own short-term interests, which seems to be what’s driven us to this point, signs would point towards every Pac-12 school calling both the Big 12 and the ACC right now, with the possible exceptions of Stanford and Cal, who really might be college football nihilists. If the Big 12 were to get its pick of the litter and take three schools, one would imagine it would take Washington and then two of the four of Oregon, Stanford, Arizona, and Arizona State. Those five seem pretty evidently to be the five biggest prizes left, especially if the point of Stanford *or* Cal is to get into the Bay Area market (Stanford should trump Cal within that showdown). Would the Big 12 get its pick of the litter? I’m not sure. The ACC might have some say, and if schools are offering millions to other schools to get bailed out of this trouble, maybe Washington and Oregon really could find their way to the Big Ten, but I haven’t seen that theorized anywhere but here.

What’s really puzzling is what happens if the Pac-12 is left with only four or six schools. Do those four or six (or five, or three) circle the wagons and try to raid the Mountain West? Do they try to merge with the Mountain West? Do they make a move towards the Sun Belt or the American? Do they consider football independence? If it’s just Washington State and Oregon State, the littlest brothers in the league, it seems more straightforward: Join the Mountain West. But what if this gets funky and it ends up being those two, Cal, Utah, and Arizona State? In the FCS, you need six teams to qualify for an automatic playoff bid. How many teams do you need in the new College Football Playoff format? How many would be enough to get some shred of respect?

At the very least, this seems to be accelerating. Arizona (and possibly Arizona State?) have high-level meetings on the calendar, some of which have already happened. We’ve all finally gotten a look at the emperor’s new clothes, so in some sense, that band-aid is off. For the moment, we’re in any–minute mode, but despite our newfound clarity as to how bad the deal really is, the outlook feels murkier than ever. If hazarding a guess, I’d guess the ACC does get involved. And I would guess Stanford—with its academic similarities to Duke and partial member Notre Dame—is the first they call.

The Cubs and the Letdown Question

A worry going into last night was that with the Cubs having made the decision to buy and with the winning streak over, the team would suffer a letdown and get smacked by the Reds, immediately making the eight games they won all for naught. To answer this, the Cubs fell behind 6–1 before the third inning was even over.

The Cubs did fight back, but the Cubs didn’t win, and the question has some validity. It’s such a fringe thing, but the mental and emotional side of sports is mysterious, and focus and mindset are of obvious value. The Cubs cannot afford to have already won their metaphorical championship. They need to keep pushing.

This isn’t to suggest that the only variable affecting the Cubs’ performance over the rest of 2023 is their mindset. There’s a lot going on, including every single thing their opponents do. The Cubs could have great focus and mindset and finish with 73 wins. The Cubs could have a little letdown and still win the Central. But it’s something to watch for, and it’s something where I’d imagine Wrigley Field adds an advantage: Even if you think it’s an overrated ballpark or that Cubs fans are an overrated fanbase, it’s undeniable that crowds at Wrigley are into the game. We noticed this in Cubs/Reds games last June, and those had absolutely no playoff implications.

As for tonight: This is a much better pitching matchup for the Cubs than last night’s, as should be tomorrow’s and Thursday’s. The Cubs are deservedly medium-sized favorites. Jeimer Candelario makes his re-debut, Trey Mancini is reportedly a great guy but wasn’t hitting, we’ll see who ends up on the active roster in the bullpen when all of that side is worked out. Is it a must-win? No. But it’s a baseball game with playoff implications, and as we talked about above, those are a whole lot of fun. The ace, for whatever that means on this team, is on the mound. The division gap is five games wide. I’d imagine adrenaline will not be scarce.

More Missed Shots

The U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team did not have a good time against Portugal, only narrowly missing a defeat which would have sent them home from the Southern Hemisphere before the knockout stage of this World Cup even began. Again, they had little trouble manufacturing shots, but not a single shot found the back of the net, and only six of the seventeen registered as shots on goal.

To compare this again to other contenders, here are the ten favorites in futures odds at Bovada at the moment, along with their shooting percentage and how many matches they’ve each completed:

Other teams have their issues: Spain lost 4–0 to Japan. Germany was upset by Colombia. Australia got shocked by Nigeria. Jamaica played France to a scoreless draw. Also, shooting percentage is not traditionally a highly predictive stat in soccer. The fact the U.S. has generated the second-most shot attempts out of these ten teams is a great sign. But the struggle does illustrate what’s going on with this team: It just has not been able to finish.

Meanwhile, the Netherlands won 7–0 against Vietnam, taking some of the wind out of the sails of those theorizing Vietnam deserved the credit for the first of the three disappointing American performances.