While there is plenty to discover about the American League postseason picture—which team will win each division, who is getting that final Wild Card seed, etc.—the general outlook won’t change when it comes to strengthening the argument for reseeding. No matter the final players, we know that the three worst playoff teams will almost certainly be the AL West and AL Central winners and the sixth seed occupying the final Wild Card spot; we also know that two of these three teams will form one side of the bracket, with the winner of the Wild Card round playing the second seed.
The AL picture is presently designed to have two mini-tournaments—one among its three top teams, the Rays, Yankees, and Red Sox, with only one surviving to see the ALCS—and another among its three worst teams, with an inferior team surviving to see whoever comes out of this baptism under fire on the AL East side. If one went about designing an example of such a discrepancy between two sides of a bracket, it couldn’t possibly be more lopsided than this.
Before getting into the merits of our argument, it’s important to note that this is a rather predictable occurrence—maybe not quite likely to happen so aggressively on a yearly basis, but certainly far from a surprise. What makes this year unique is that the second seed in the American League is also likely to be far from a dominant club, but if it were, that would not affect our argument—it would only leave said club with a better shot at handling a weaker side coming out of the third versus sixth battle.
If we are to look at the big picture and not just a single campaign—considering where the schedules are—it’s fairly reasonable that at least one division will have its weakness more easily exposed, not playing against each other as frequently. It is also reasonable to expect at least one Wild Card club to stand out, and that club shouldn’t be locked into a matchup against the top seed.
What motivates this desire for reseeding to be introduced is important, but it’s also somewhat established. The primary point should be that given all the changes we’ve seen in baseball over the last however many years, the traditionalistic argument to keep out reseeding simply doesn’t hammer home in the first place. What are we so afraid of? It would be understandable if this were a foreign concept never before seen in American sports, but the National Football League does it, and no one has ever said a word.
It’s a problem with change of all kinds; take the pitch clock, for instance. Even for those of us who clamored for something to speed up the game, a certain caution about how exactly it’d play out was always there. The same applies to the introduction of more teams into the postseason until reaching the current limit, which—at least for now—seems to be a firm cutoff point before getting into a sea of mediocrity no one wants any part of. All of these evolutions might have been treated as ludicrous or unlikely at some point before they became such a regular part of our routine; now they’re second nature.
Assessing the situation from this particular lens, it’s mind-boggling why the reseeding argument hasn’t received as much traction, because the aforementioned changes represented far more unsettling ruptures than reseeding implemented on our current format would.