4:36 pm: League owners have ratified the deal, Sherman tweets. Sixteen teams will make the playoffs this season.
3:27 pm: ESPN’s Buster Olney reports that the top two teams in each division will qualify for the postseason under this format. The seventh and eighth teams in each league will be chosen based on the best overall records for the remaining teams. Athletic’s Jayson Stark adds that all three games in the first round of a series would be played in the home park of the highest seed, thus eliminating the need for a day of travel.
3:00 pm: Just hours before the first pitch of the 2020 season, Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association have agreed on an expanded postseason pitch. ESPN’s Marly Rivera reports that the union has accepted the proposal, which now only needs to be ratified by the owners. The New York Post’s Joel Sherman suggests that will happen (Twitter link), and USA Today’s Bob Nightengale tweets that there will be 16 teams and a best-of-three first-round series (rather than a sudden death) . Card Configuration). The deal covers the 2020 season only, for both Rivera and Sherman.
The postseason expansion comes with a $ 50MM player pool for players, Nightengale reports. That’s particularly remarkable given that in a traditional season, postseason player actions are derived solely from gate revenue and not from television ratings. Previous estimates of additional television revenue on a suggested expanded postseason field between $ 200-300MM could be generated by expanding to 16 teams, and the property agreed to share some of that windfall with the players side.
The possible ramifications here are wide-ranging. It’s easy to imagine this serving as a litmus test for a future postseason expansion. The league had tried to boost 14 to 16 teams due to the considerable additional revenue (the aforementioned revenue increase was only referring to television money) and presenting it as a kind of experiment in an already anomalous season is perhaps one more way. acceptable to normalize the change.
From the team’s point of view, the impact this has on the trade deadline could be huge. There have been many questions regarding how much clubs will be willing to give up to acquire rental players in a 60-game season, particularly if the most likely postseason scenario included a sudden-death Wild Card game. Now clubs will at least be assured of a three-game series. Along with the expanded number of marginal contenders, an expansion of the six-team field, which could encourage some teams to be more aggressive buyers.
The increased number of postseason clubs not only widens the field of potential buyers but also reduces the number of teams that will be pure sellers. That could serve to increase the demand for business assets in the few teams that commit to selling parts. And it could lead to some dramatic last-minute decisions for teams on the cusp. The current brand of methodical and analytical GMs don’t make emotional or even irrational dives into transactions that once proliferated the cutoff season, but there’s a good chance we’ll see some creative exchanges of unexpected players again. The complicated exchanges of three teams have become prominent in recent years, and a radical change in the playoff format should only encourage creativity.
What about teams with commercial candidates that have multiple remaining club control seasons? At a time when clubs are reluctant to part ways with high-end talent to acquire 30 rental games, a controlled player in 2021, 2022 or more becomes highly attractive. Matthew Boyd, Caleb Smith, Jon Gray, Francisco Lindor, Nolan Arenado and other controllable names that have been banned on the rumor circuit in recent years will again be in demand. Depending on the state of those players’ teams in the middle of the season, the motivation to reach an agreement could increase. It’s worth remembering that only players in a team’s 60-man group can trade, so there are some clear restrictions in the game, but the domino effect here could be considerable.
