October means it’s playoff baseball

While October is the time for scary movies and haunted houses, it is also one of the best months for sports aficionados. The NFL and NCAA football seasons are in full swing at this point, professional hockey and basketball begin, and there always seems to be some sort of soccer going on. But my favorite of these October sports is the MLB postseason.

The past few years have been even more exciting, with the Brewers actually having been a participant (though outside of their run in 2018 they’ve been little more than just that), but this year the Crew is not in contention. Still, the last few years have built my appreciation for playoff baseball, and even with my team out of the running, I find myself much more inclined to watch.

And I think that is because, in my opinion, baseball has one of the best playoffs, perhaps second to the first weekend of March Madness. And while the NCAA basketball tournament benefits from its format and number of teams that can make unexpected runs, the MLB playoffs probably can’t count that as one of its strengths. If anything, the format is probably one of the baseball playoffs’ weaker aspects, with tweaks being done every few years in an attempt to create a more exciting product, with middling results at best. No, the MLB playoffs are elevated due to the nature of the game of baseball itself.

Baseball is a dramatic game. Intrinsically, it has more ability to build this drama than soccer or basketball due to its pacing and the nature of scoring. Basketball, especially at the professional level, is too fast paced and prone to runs that put teams behind by large scores to adequately build tension. Plays happen quickly and points that are scored from those plays have minimal contribution to the overall point total. There is no single basketball play equivalent to a hockey goal, a football touchdown, or a baseball home run. Soccer has the opposite problem; scoring is so spaced out that the tension is stretched too thin and it loses its appeal.

With no game clock signaling the end for a team’s chances to win and ample time to build tension between plays, no one is ever completely out of a baseball game and game changing moments can happen at any time. Every pitch is important, as the threat of a hit or a home run looms large. Football and hockey better match this pacing, which is part of the reason why those playoffs are so highly lauded.

But something that makes the baseball playoffs so interesting to me is that there is a complete shift in strategy from the regular season. For better or worse, the MLB season is a marathon, a 162-game grindfest that requires teams to try to conserve players over the course of the year. Starting pitchers have closely guarded pitch counts and only pitch once or maybe twice a week. Veterans are often given rest days, closers might not come into a close game because they pitched two nights in a row.

And while that number of games is somewhat necessary for the best teams to rise to the surface (see the 2020 Brewers as an example of why a 60-game season allows not so good teams into the playoffs), it also means that the season suffers from the same pacing issue as a basketball game. Each individual win or loss has less impact on the team’s final record than in most sports, and, as such, managers sometimes need to keep the big picture in mind when creating strategies for individual games. This also results in all that intrinsic drama that an individual baseball game can have to be sucked out of it, due to the fact that the result of the game often means little in the scheme of a whole season.

All of that is thrown out the window when October hits. This is baseball at its best. Every game counts, every run feels monumental, every pitch has the possibility of completely flipping a game on its head. Pitch counts, rest days, managing workloads, all gone in favor of “What do I think will win me this game today?” It is such a 180 from the typical that it almost cheats in a way. The drama and excitement from playoff baseball partially comes from how much of a slog its regular season can become at times. Whether that’s a good thing or not, I can’t really say.

And maybe it is that releasing of the regular season shackles that tricks me into thinking that the baseball playoffs are superior in many ways to other sports’ playoffs. But there is also just something that I can’t really explain; maybe it’s the history, maybe it’s just something about the nature of the game, but it just feels special in some way.

The Brew Crew may be out, but I’ve got six other teams still in it. As long as I’m not looking at a Dodgers-Astros World Series, I think I’ll be happy.

A C ertain Point of V iew

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