The 2024 World Series matchup was a hype-machine doozy. The first Los Angeles Dodgers-New York Yankees World Series in 43 years. The collision of soon-to-be MVPs in Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge. And, most germane to our subject today, a pairing of this year's top playoff seeds.
As an admitted obsessive about all things related to format -- schedule, playoff structure, divisional alignment, etc. -- I can't help but notice that there is much less griping about the third year of MLB's current 12-team playoffs than there was a year ago.
The difference? Primarily, it's because last year we had two wild-card teams in the World Series, including a second straight sixth-seeded entrant from the National League. This year, we ended up with a one-versus-one pairing between two of the game's most storied franchises. People watched. All is well.
Thus the context for today's look at how the format is working is very different than when we did this last year. Nevertheless, even as I make a few observations about what can be gleaned from the 2024 postseason and the structure that produced it, one thing remains true: It's too soon to make any declarative statements about the current setup.
Just as last year's Texas Rangers-Arizona Diamondbacks Fall Classic could not hold up as a condemnation of the system, nor can this year's Dodgers-Yankees clash serve as a definitive validation. Our feelings about the postseason structure remain a work in progress.
Still, every season we complete adds a little information to what we know, and how we feel about it. Here are five observations about the format that gave us what was, all in all, a memorable October.
1. Home is not so sweet
We begin with home-field advantage because it informs most of what follows. A lot of the success of any playoff format in terms of producing a good balance of the expected and the unexpected depends on the integrity of seeds, or how meaningful the difference between them turns out to be. In large part this in turn hinges on home-field advantage, the primary reward for owning a higher seed than your opponent, with the notable exception of earning a bye.
This year, playoff home teams went 22-21, an improvement over last year when home teams went 15-26 and the Rangers were a perfect 11-0 on the road. That's better, but this still is far from being a meaningful benefit for owning a higher seed.
The aggregate postseason winning percentage often vacillates wildly from season to season. It's a very small sample size and the correlation between the hierarchy of seeds and actual team quality is far from perfect. Still, these numbers mirror a regular-season trend.
If you look at five-year windows, the overall regular-season home winning percentage during the divisional era (beginning in 1969) peaked from 2006 to 2010 at .551. That number has fallen steadily ever since, reaching .531 after the five-season period just completed. That's the lowest mark since the mid-1970s. The numbers over the past two seasons (.522 and .521) are the lowest in 30 years.
For the playoffs, let's consider 15-year windows to get a smoother trend line. The peak home winning percentage of the era was .602 for the 1978-92 period. It has fluctuated a lot since -- the low point was after the 1989-2003 period -- but the current mark (.535 for 2010 to 2024) is the lowest it's been since 2010.
However you look at it, the advantages of playing at home aren't what they used to be, and that trend might be picking up steam. This is not good for the integrity of baseball's seeding structure.
2. People like power teams
As has been widely reported, the television ratings for this year's World Series were up markedly over last season, which were at an all-time ebb.
If you just glance at a database of historical Fall Classic television ratings, like this one from the Baseball Almanac, you get a sense of how things have changed over time as the media landscape has become increasingly diffused. The Yankees-Dodgers World Series in 1978 averaged 44.3 million viewers, tops in the divisional era. We're just not going to see numbers like that again.
Much of how we view this, for now, is anecdotal. Last year we had a matchup of two good, but not great teams and only about 9.1 million people per game cared to watch. This year we had two high-profile top seeds and 14.3 million tuned in. Make of that what you will.
Because the landscape has changed so much over time, it's hard to do any kind of study in this area. Since 1969, there have been 17 instances of the ratings making at least a two-point jump in year-over-year comparisons, per that data from Baseball Almanac. (This year's jump over 2023 was 2.2 points.) Nine times those matchups featured a team from Boston, Los Angeles or New York. But of course that means eight times it did not.
Overall, during the division era, the ratings for the 14 one-versus-one matchups were 6.2 points higher than other 41 matchups. That number dwindles to 0.6, however, if you just zero in on the wild-card era but the sample size for one-versus-one pairings is just five. One of those one-versus-one matchups came in 2020 during the pandemic and, really, any study looking at sports trends should just treat 2020 as if it never happened.
Since 2000, there have been five ratings jumps of at least two points. Three of those featured the Yankees (2001, 2009 and 2024), one featured the Red Sox (2013) and the other was the 2016 Fall Classic between the Cubs and Guardians -- an all-time outlier in terms of general interest.
This suggests that the bigger the market, the better the teams and the juicier the narratives, the more people are going to watch. That certainly isn't any kind of great revelation but just an empirical observation about something generally sensed.
If this observation is correct, then it would make sense that baseball would want to make sure that its playoff structure -- over a span of however many years you want to consider -- is balanced between producing matchups like one we got this year as opposed to what we got last year.
You accomplish this through a format that features a meaningful difference between seeds.
Certainly market size connects to broad fan interest. This season, the ratings for both League Championship Series matchups were up but the NLCS between the large-market Dodgers and Mets drew more eyeballs than the ALCS pairing between the Yankees and Guardians.
The Yankees are always a draw and when they played Cleveland, it pitted the AL's top two seeds against each other. Yet the mega-market Dodgers-Mets series drew higher ratings even though New York was a six-seed. That's just one season, anecdotal evidence, but it did happen.
Baseball doesn't need to (and absolutely should not) put the thumb on the scale for the big market clubs, any more than already exists because of the game's economics. Insofar as large-market teams have an economic advantage, over time the kind of seed differentiation to which I refer would yield more Dodgers-Yankees-type matchups, if only because those markets tend to end up with higher seeds more often than clubs in mid-to-small markets.
Besides, there is evidence that market size isn't the only thing that generates interest. When I ran correlations between yearly TV ratings for the Series against various measures, I found that there is a stronger correlation between what I called "seed score" than "market score." The difference wasn't overwhelming, but it does suggest that market size isn't the only thing that influences broad interest, at least at World Series time.
Obviously when you have a situation like this year -- power seeds and big markets -- that's ideal from a ratings standpoint. Beyond that, however, baseball would benefit from a playoff format that did more to reward each season's top regular-season clubs.
3. The layoff might not be such a big deal after all
This year, the four LDS series produced three winners that enjoyed a first-round bye -- the Dodgers, Yankees and Guardians. Only the Mets, who made a bid to become the NL's third straight sixth-seeded pennant winner, broke through, topping the Phillies.
Thus we can update these counts: In three years under the current 12-team playoff format, we've had 26 LCS games that featured a bye team (up from 15) and 11 in the World Series (up from six). Things are looking better.
We still can't say whether the layoff between the regular season and the start of the LDS for bye teams hurts, helps or does nothing. At the same time, for now, we can ease our hand-wringing about it being an overwhelming factor. This remains something to track as the years pass.
4. Postseason baseball is a very different game -- particularly the weird pitching staffs
The champion Dodgers employed bullpen games liberally en route to their title, though the deeper they got into October, the more their staff began to look like a classic Dodgers rotation-driven group. They survived their early dearth of rotation innings but if by the end they weren't getting longer outings from Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Walker Buehler, they might have run out of arms. (Since Buehler closed the clincher, you might argue that L.A. did run out of arms.)
The Tigers nearly advanced to the ALCS by leaning more on bullpenning games than traditional starts. The Royals advanced to the LDS by leaning much more heavily on its bullpen than the starting staff that carried them all season.
One thing you heard frequently during the most recent October was the theory that the less a team was tethered to defined pitching staff roles, the better suited they were for success in the playoff format.
Determining whether that is true is too large an investigation for today but if this is a growing trend, and eventually every team resembles this year's Tigers -- Tarik Skubal and all the rest -- that is less than ideal.
Some of it is the marketing aspect of bullpen games, but more so it's just that as this trend proliferates, the less the playoff game resembles the regular-season game.
It's impossible to recreate in October the competitive conditions teams are exposed to from April through September. Thus, it's only natural things would look a little different.
For now, we only pose the question: Is it healthy for the game that the playoffs look this different? Shouldn't it be the same game, as opposed to something like the World Baseball Classic?
5. We got lucky, but the ghost win is still a viable option
The Dodgers and Yankees were the best teams in their respective leagues all season. There were ebbs and flows within each circuit, but from stem to stern this was the case. They had the best records and the top seeds, then met in the World Series. That much was almost lost in the hype (justified hype, but still hype) about the markets, the history and the superstars involved. So I'll state it here: That we ended up with a World Series matchup between two teams that would have been the pennant winners even in the pre-division era was highly satisfying.
But just as last year's randomness wasn't the default outcome for this structure, nor is this year's coherence. It could have easily never happened. The Dodgers might have lost Game 5 in the NLDS round to San Diego. The Yankees were only a couple of plays from being toppled by Kansas City in the ALDS, despite their winning the best-of-five series in four games.
At the outset of the playoffs, I ran the same exercise in simulations I engage in all year. That last pre-October run yielded these probabilities:
Yankees: 36.7% chance for AL pennant
Dodgers: 29.1% chance for NL pennant
Yankees-Dodgers World Series pairing: 11% chance
To go full sci-fi on you, in 89% of the parallel universes out there, our other selves saw a different Fall Classic. Too bad for them. (Unless, of course, they root for one of the alternate-reality World Series teams.)
Just because it worked this year doesn't mean it'll work next year or in any given year after that. Most of the time, it won't. Even as the format topic has quieted down, for now, every word I wrote about it last year remains true: We have to be open to tweaking it when we have enough evidence to do so.
Last year, I ran through a lot of possible adjustments and won't repeat those now. I'll focus on one suggestion presented in a different way.
In our 2023 look at the format, I ran simulations between different versions of the system but with generic team percentages, just to pin down the difference between seeds, not teams. This time, I ran simulations through the prism of our just-completed dream matchup -- Dodgers-Yankees -- using what I think is the most powerful tool for adding integrity to the current format: The ghost win.
As I wrote last year, there are different ways of using that tool. I still think it should be used in the wild-card round, with a ghost win going to the division champ (the three-seed) that doesn't get a bye. My long-term vision for the structure includes going back to four divisions, entirely to get rid of the specter of wild-card division champs. This is the single biggest problem with the current format.
That rant restated, let's return to our problem of generating one-versus-one matchups. I used the ghost win this time only in series involving the 1-seeds -- the Yankees and Dodgers. In each of the LDS and LCS series in which they appeared during the 10,000 simulations, they were spotted a victory. (We wouldn't use the ghost win in the World Series.)
Here are the probabilities from our ghost-win simulations:
Yankees: 54.7% chance for AL pennant
Dodgers: 53.3% chance for NL pennant
Yankees-Dodgers World Series pairing: 29% chance
I strongly believe advocacy for the ghost win is going to increase in the years to come -- and this is why. The differences in probability from the current system to this one is ideal, creating not just a greater prevalence of one-versus-one matchups, but a major incentive for teams to pursue the top seed in their league. Yet it doesn't box out upstart teams like last year's Diamondbacks or this year's Mets. It's a better balance than what we'll see over the years if the current system remains unchanged.
This year's World Series was the perfect pairing and the product of the structure we have in place. Its success in terms of drawing attention isn't a validation of that structure. It's only a reminder of why we want to see these perfect pairings more often in the first place.