Kansas City Royals: Not all proposed playoff changes are bad

Baseball continues to lag behind other sports and needs to get out of the rut of ‘tradition. Any attempt to increase and keep interest in the game should be studied and the Kansas City Royals would greatly benefit from it.

First off, there is a notion that must be quickly dispelled, and it’s true of any league that has a playoff. Major League Baseball has zero interest under their current format in the best team winning the World Series.

If a league wanted their best team to be the champion, the team with the best record at the end of the regular season would be the champion.

A rumored proposal has Rob Manfred and the rest of the league looking at making changes to baseball and their post-season. Much like everything that happens in baseball, it’s long overdue.

Under the current format of baseball, Kansas City Royals fans will check out when, say – mid June perhaps? Certainly by the end of July, fans for the most part will stop caring. That exists league wide in cities of teams highly unlikely to compete for the division on a regular basis.

At a very minimum, if teams like the Royals are theoretically in postseason consideration for longer into a season, fan interest will increase. Again, if you can get in, fans will show up hoping for a win.

Does it solve everything? Of course not, there is no magic fix to this. But in to many cities, fans are done showing up to baseball games simply because their team is schedule filling fodder for teams in contention. Why go out to the ballpark?

The Kansas City Royals are the current and living form of why the current format doesn’t work. General Manager Dayton Moore has insisted he isn’t tanking; that’s not how he’s built. He wants to win games at the big league level while he reloads the future.

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Yet the team he’s put together with pieces that other teams are willing to trade legitimate prospects for has lost a combined 207 games over the past two seasons and will be drafting in the top four of the baseball draft for the second consecutive season.

His plan has failed completely and in dramatic fashion. Does anyone have any confidence that the Royals are going to win at least 73 games (the number required to avoid a 90 loss season)?

Expanding the playoffs gives teams like the Royals hope they can sneak into the playoffs more often, which can increase fan interest for an extended period of time during the late spring and summer.

Will it work every year? No. However, knowing the Royals would have been tied in 2017 about getting in, perhaps more fans would have cared about what was taking place on the field.

Not everything about the idea is great.

Teams having an opportunity to pick their opponent doesn’t make sense. Expanding the postseason increases not only the teams that get in, but the teams with an opportunity to get in. The NBA has 16 teams in their playoff field in a 30 team league, so the notion that more teams makes things worse is a complete farce.

The NBA has shot past MLB in terms of popularity and overall fan interest, and is so far behind the NFL it’s impossible to for baseball to see football. Manfred has to be worried baseball is descending toward hockey – or even worse – as a purely regional sport with limited fan interest nationally and floating interest regionally. I hate to use the term “baseball has to do something”, but doing nothing isn’t working.

When teams have more incentive to win, they will do so. We shouldn’t cast judgement on teams ‘tanking’, but wonder why it took so long for teams to figure out tanking was the appropriate course of action. Teams that win 81 games can’t be made to fail the way the current baseball format does. No other sport casts views upon .500 teams as losers quite the way baseball does.

The Kansas City Royals would benefit greatly from an expanded playoff format. It’s certainly obvious, under the current format they are not able to compete on a regular basis.

Remember – If you are worried about baseball’s best team winning a championship, understand this, your argument shouldn’t to be avoid increasing the playoffs, but to eliminate them entirely. Think about what you want and go from there.