The Pros and Cons of New MLB Playoff Format for Mariners

While the Mookie Betts trade became official yesterday, the biggest news outside of those two markets came from Joel Sherman’s report that MLB is proposing a new playoff format. What could this mean for the Mariners?

The baseball world was rocked back on Monday when Joel Sherman reported that MLB is proposing a brand new playoff format beginning in 2022 that would, amongst other things, raise the number of playoff teams from 5 in each league, to 7. Naturally, Mariners’ nation had some opinions.

You can read everything that is known about the proposal here, but anytime MLB implements a rule change, no matter how small, people instantly make hard opinions. Now granted, changing a playoff format isn’t small, but it isn’t close to official, which is something we should keep in mind.

The long-form proposal calls for 3 division winners, as always, and 4 wild card teams. The team with the best record in each league would be awarded a “first round” bye. Now here comes the crazy part: the team with the best record in each round would get to pick their opponent, while the second-best record would to pick their opponent after that.

The one-game wild-card playoff game would be eliminated as a result and replaced with a 3 game series, with all 3 games being played at the higher seeds home ballpark.

So now that we know the basic outline of the proposal, I think we can instantly start to pick out some of the pros and cons of baseball’s new idea. But whether you think this is a good idea or not, we should acknowledge that both sides have potentially valid points in their favor.

So naturally, we will explore some of the positives of this idea, as well as the negatives. Hopefully, we can keep an open mind (which can be hard for a lot of baseball fans). But let’s think positive and start with a few of the positives.