The National League Championship Series began last night, with the No. 6 Phillies beating the fifth-seeded Padres in San Diego. The American League Division Series starts tonight in Houston, with the top-seeded Astros hosting the No. 2 Yankees. The contrast between the two championship series matchups is one of the great joys of the baseball playoffs. That these four teams are the last remaining is an indication that anything and everything can happen when the calendar turns to October, and that the 162 games played in the regular season truly aren’t enough to determine a winner.
The other day, I wrote about the unpredictability that has always been part of the MLB postseason and that it’s too soon to say whether the latest expansion, to 12 teams, provides an unfair disadvantage to the best regular-season teams. Naturally, the Yankees followed that up with two wins over the Guardians to secure their third ALCS matchup with the mighty Astros in the last six playoffs. This doesn’t mean that what happened in the senior circuit with San Diego and Philadelphia is a fluke, or that the new format has done anything to preserve the sanctity of the 162-game regular season, either.
That said, the juxtaposition of the two matchups is notable, even if we cannot draw any grand conclusions about the 12-team postseason in its first year. The two AL teams represent the old guard, the two teams we can reliably expect to field competitive rosters each year (at least since 2015, in Houston’s case). The NL clubs are the new arrivals, organizations that went through long spells of losing to get to this point, taking a similar approach—though with more stops and restarts—to the teardown-and-rebuild model of development that the Astros revolutionized. My guess, though I’ll qualify it is speculative based on a one-year sample, is that we could see a similar distribution of newcomers and returners become the norm for the postseason moving forward. More teams in the postseason gives more franchises a chance to make it and, if they get hot at the right time—as has been the case this year for the Phillies and Padres—they can advance through the early rounds. And on the other hand, there is always a place in October for the premier organizations.
