Resetting the Playoffs

As I reset my Mulligan 2021 season in Out of the Park Baseball, I have decided that I want to expand the playoffs. I like the Wild Card and the current system in MLB but I think there could be a bit more excitement and more teams pushing to make the post season if we had a 16 team system. This would allow 6 more teams to make the tournament.

The way I set things up would take the top 2 teams from each division and add in the 2 Wild Card teams. That would give us 8 teams per league to face off against each other leading up to the World Series.

I think it would enhance some of the September excitement like what we saw this year between LA and SF, between Bo’s, NY, and Toronto, and it would allow teams that may have performed well earlier in the season survive late season streaks like the Cardinals put together.

Anyway, here’s how the 2021 playoffs would have looked with my updated Mulligan system…

#1 Tampa Bay would host #8 Cleveland – Cleveland was the 2nd best team in the AL Central but had the worst record of the American League playoff teams so they get to face the Rays.

#2 Houston would face division rival #7 Seattle who came in 2nd in the division.

#3 Chicago would take on #6 Toronto who would take the 2nd Wild Card spot.

And then there is the big rivalry – NY takes on Boston. It’s only relevant who ended up as the runner up to Tampa Bay in the AL East and who ended up as the first Wild Card to determine who gets home field advantage, so I’m not gonna worry about how that breakdown occurred.

Anyway, I think we’d have some interesting matchups and some fun drama going on. The 3 new teams that would make the playoffs that did not play in reality are: Seattle, Cleveland, and Toronto and personally, I think both Seattle and Toronto could easily have made a case that they were good enough to make the post season.

In the NL, things dip down to a team under .500 but if the season had ended early, the Padres would have been a contender for a Wild Card anyway. Here’s how things would have played out…

#1 San Francisco would host division rival #8 San Diego. The Padres finished the season 79–83 but they were a much better team than that, they were just in a division that saw teams win 107 and 106 games.

#2 LA would face #7 Philadelphia who had a pretty good season at 82–80 but was left out in the real world by the surging Cardinals.

#3 Milwaukee would host #6 Cincinnati in a battle of the Central Division.

#4 St. Louis would host #5 (and actual 2021 World Series Champs) Atlanta.

With this expanded system teams that were fighting for the playoffs before September would still have made it and we’d see Cincinnati, San Diego, and the Phillies who played really well but were crushed by the Cardinal win at the end of the season.

This is how I decided to set things up for Mulligan 2021 and I also adjusted the duration of the different matchups. I don’t like single game contests – those are for football where there’s only a single game played each week. Baseball is about the team and the only way you see how a team performs is by pushing them to play multiple games.

I set the first round of my playoffs to 3 games. Since this is a simulation we don’t have to get any kind of approval from owners or unions SWL I say 3 games for the first round…no one and done playoff teams.

The second round will be 5 games followed by 7 for the League Championship and 7 for the World Series.

It’s a simulation so I really don’t care if we are playing baseball into November or if there is snow on the field…I just want baseball.

Ramble 82 Cheetah 27| 2022.6 | Resetting the Playoffs