World Series: Game 1 was a blast!
Texas Rangers' Adolis Garcia hits a RBI single against the Arizona Diamondbacks during the first inning in Game 1 of the baseball World Series Friday, Oct. 27, 2023, in Arlington, Texas. Credit: AP/Tony Gutierrez
ARLINGTON, Texas
Only in baseball, at its marquee event, on the verge of crowning a champion, does everyone get wrapped up in a discussion about how MLB is doing this whole playoff thing wrong.
Crazy, right? But that’s been the conversation all October.
Every division winner got knocked off and left the sport with two wild-card teams, the Rangers and Diamondbacks, playing in Game 1 of the World Series on Friday night at Globe Life Field.
So of course that discussion continued right up to the final minutes before Nathan Eovaldi’s opening pitch to Corbin Carroll. From union chief Tony Clark to commissioner Rob Manfred, each being grilled on whether baseball screwed up by having two clubs in the Fall Classic that totaled 174 wins, the fewest ever at the end of a 162-game season.
But after the Rangers’ electrifying 6-5 win over the Diamondbacks, a victory made possible by Corey Seager’s tying two-run homer in the ninth inning followed by Adolis Garcia’s walk-off blast in the 11th, consider Game 1 a conversation-changer.
Arizona wiped out an early 2-0 deficit on Corbin Carroll’s two-run triple in the second inning and Tommy Pham snapped a 3-3 tie with his third postseason homer in the fourth. But closer Paul Sewald — who hadn’t allowed a run in nine innings in this postseason — couldn’t protect a 5-3 lead in the ninth, serving up a first-pitch fastball to Seager, who hammered a 418-foot shot into the second deck in rightfield with one out as the sellout crowd of 42,472 erupted along with the indoor fireworks.
“It’s harder to hit a bigger home run than what he did there,” Rangers manager Bruce Bochy said. “He saved us.”
And Manfred, too, in a sense. The commissioner couldn’t have dialed up a much better World Series opening act. But a few hours earlier, he acknowledged the negative buzz surrounding this year’s October tournament.
“All I can say about the consternation — because it’s kind of a constant in our game — is that it will at least motivate a conversation about whether we have it right,” Manfred said roughly 90 minutes before Game 1. “I’m sure that conversation will take place in the offseason. Enough has been written and said that we have to think about it and talk about it. But my own view is that the format served us pretty well.”
That’s open to some debate. Not only did this October involve bouncing three 100-win division champs in Atlanta, the Orioles and the Dodgers, but the entire trio waved bye-bye after playing just one round.
If we’re talking about the integrity of a 162-game season, what value is there to being great for six months if all it buys you is a five-day cooling-off period that winds up icing a team by the time the Division Series arrives? But Manfred chose to accentuate the positive of this unlikely matchup — duh — as a testament to the unpredictability of his sport. He agreed with a reporter who suggested the distinction between regular-season performance and playoff success is a “feature” of the system rather than a “bug.”
“Exactly,” Manfred said. “If the die was cast, meaning that if I win 100 in the regular season, I’m going to win the World Series, I don’t think that’s as interesting as what we have witnessed over the last month.”
Fair point. So how did MLB get here? Well, if you recall the last CBA negotiations before the 2022 season, the playoff format was a contentious sticking point between the two sides, with MLB pushing to increase the playoff field from 10 to a whopping 14. Not only that, but the blueprint called for byes for the top two teams in each league, with the next two division winners getting to choose their opening-round opponents from the wild-card group (in a made-for-television event, of course).
The union balked at that, preferring instead a “ghost win” format that involved the higher seed being home for all the games and needing two victories to advance while the visiting club had to win three. The concept was borrowed from the Korean Baseball Organization, which has used it since 2015, but MLB wanted no part of it.
“I was an advocate to make sure that there was more than just home-field advantage for the division winners,” the Rangers’ Max Scherzer recalled. “That’s why I was a fan of the ghost win, or game-in-hand, whatever you want to call it. I thought that was a more fair system that takes the regular season into account more.”
Scherzer wouldn’t go as far as to say that the 162-game season is devalued under the current format. He just believes there has to be a greater reward for the accomplishment of winning a division, which is a goal that teams should be built for. That also ties into a financial boon for the players, as clubs presumably would spend more to go for that October advantage at the end.
“I shudder to think at this point where we might be if we had 14 teams instead of 12,” Clark said before Game 1. “But I think the teams, that once they got in, played the best throughout the course of the playoffs are the ones that are still standing.”
That will have to do for this October. Stay tuned about the future.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
