For years, Major League Baseball has floated ideas like the universal DH, pitch clocks and eliminating shifts. But it turns out the league had much grander visions when it came to fundamentally changing what a season looks like.
Expanding the postseason has taken center stage during these lockout negotiations, particularly Monday when the sides went back and forth so many times that the No. 2 trending topic in the country was Bob Nightengale. The players have been willing to expand the playoffs from 10 teams to 12, but the owners have repeatedly asked for a field of 14, and it's easy to see why. As always, follow the money.
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It's also easy to figure out why the players balked at having 14 playoff teams. Their goal has been to give owners incentives to spend, and you don't have to push quite as hard in the offseason if you know 83 wins might get you into a postseason that's often a crapshoot once it begins. Expanding last year's postseason to 14 teams would have allowed the 83-win Cincinnati Reds and 82-win Philadelphia Phillies to get in.
While the negotiations are fluid, it appears the sides have settled on a 12-team field, with Buster Olney of ESPN providing the details.
The proposal leads to more questions than answers right now, but on this corner of the internet, there's usually just one main one: What does this mean for the Giants?
You can look at it two ways. The glass-half-full approach is to point out what Farhan Zaidi, Scott Harris and Gabe Kapler have done in two years together. They're 136-86 the last two seasons, and all that success has come with very little spending on free agents and just about no contributions from a farm system that's rapidly improving.
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This is a front office and staff that very clearly knows how to work around the edges to build a competitive team, and when you throw in increased spending and guys like Marco Luciano in future years, it's hard to picture the Giants going into any season feeling anything but really, really good about their chances to be one of the top six teams in a 15-team league.
The goals are higher, of course, but adding that sixth spot allows more leeway for injuries or -- more importantly for the Giants -- the realities of being in a tough division. The 2018 season is the best recent example of this; the additional postseason teams would have been two well-run organizations, the 90-win Tampa Bay Rays and 88-win St. Louis Cardinals. Both finished third in their divisions -- something that very easily could happen to the Giants in an NL West that includes the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres -- but both would have made the postseason under the new proposed format.
The downside of all this is that the Giants didn't just build a competitor in 2021, they built a 107-win juggernaut. An expanded postseason dilutes the field and further opens up the possibility that a future 100-win Giants team could ultimately get knocked out by a team that won something like 85 games and got outscored during the regular season.
The Giants likely won't win 107 games again, but they do expect to compete for the NL West title every year, and that crown doesn't mean quite as much under the new system. MLB is trying to help with that by adding first-round byes, but that might prove to be a negative at times. Baseball players, particularly hitters, rely on being in a good rhythm, and it's not hard to imagine the league's best team getting knocked out by a lesser opponent because a few key bats got rusty after three or four extra days off.
The Giants know this better than just about anyone because they very likely benefited from a similar situation. As they were coming back in a thrilling seven-game series with the Cardinals in 2012, the Detroit Tigers were sweeping the New York Yankees. The Tigers were favored -- never forget that infamous double checkmark on the "keys to the World Series" graphic -- but they had five days off while the Giants had one, and the series was a stunning sweep, with the Tigers batting .159 and ace Justin Verlander melting down in his first start in eight days. In the aftermath, a lot of the talk in Detroit was about the long layoff.
In the years since that series, the Giants have made the playoffs three times, and it's hard to say the new format would have had much of an impact on the organization. They certainly benefited from a one-game playoff instead of a three-game series in 2014, but Madison Bumgarner probably wasn't being stopped by anything that month.
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None of the teams that missed the playoffs would have benefited from the extra spot, although the 2016 team would have had a lot more breathing room down the stretch. Those Giants finished one game ahead of the Cardinals for the final wild card spot, but they were eighth games clear of the seventh-best team in the NL.
Kapler's first team in 2020 was a surprise, but still finished ninth in the NL and missed an expanded field. Last year's team would have had a first-round bye and a different path through the postseason, but perhaps a showdown with the Dodgers was always in the cards.