Should MLB Change Playoff Format? Ex-Red Sox Kevin Youkilis Offers Idea

The 2018 Major League Baseball regular season lasted a little longer than expected, as 162 games weren’t enough to sort out the National League playoff picture.

The Chicago Cubs hosted the Milwaukee Brewers and the Los Angeles Dodgers hosted the Colorado Rockies on Monday in a pair of tiebreaker games to determine the NL Central champion and the NL West champion. The losers square off in the NL Wild Card Game on Tuesday.

While it’s hard to complain about the intensity that comes with such matchups, former major leaguer Kevin Youkilis, who spent parts of nine seasons with the Boston Red Sox (2004-12), took to Twitter on Monday afternoon to express some disappointment with the current MLB playoff format.

Here’s his suggestion for how things should go:

https://twitter.com/GreekGodOfHops/status/1046834257501376513

You see, the Atlanta Braves didn’t need to play Monday because they already clinched the NL East, winning the division by eight games over the second-place Washington Nationals. But the Braves totaled 90 wins in their 162 regular-season games — less than each of the four teams that played Monday in the hopes of securing a spot in the NL Division Series.

Meanwhile, in the American League, the New York Yankees will host the Oakland Athletics in the Wild Card Game on Wednesday to determine who faces the Boston Red Sox in the ALDS. But the Yankees (100) and A’s (97) both have more wins than the Cleveland Indians (91), who already secured a date with the Houston Astros in the ALDS by virtue of winning the terrible AL Central.

The implementation of a second wild card spot was geared toward incentivizing winning the division. The drawback, however, is when a team leading a weaker division coasts to the playoffs while other, arguably better clubs are pushed to the brink of elimination because they happen to share a division with more formidable opponents.