Welcome to Snyder’s Soapbox! Here, I pontificate about matters related to Major League Baseball on a weekly basis. Some of the topics will be pressing matters, some might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and most will be somewhere in between. The good thing about this website is that it’s free, and you are allowed to click away. If you stay, you’ll get smarter, though. That’s a money-back guarantee. Let’s get to it.

One of the best features of the marathon that is the Major League Baseball season is that it weeds out small-sample flukes and the best teams eventually rise to the top. I never had a problem with the playoffs being small-sample series as long as we only had the best teams in the playoffs.

Now? 

Man, I just don’t know. 

I understand what MLB is doing in terms of keeping the most teams possible involved in the playoff races as long as possible. I understand why the Wild Card Series went to three games and, of course, I understand why it’s more exciting to have an unpredictable tournament where it seems like anything is possible. 

The problem, though, is we have a bunch of teams still involved in the playoff race that aren’t playoff-caliber teams.

You know what happens then? You end up with the 84-win Diamondbacks in the World Series. With all due to respect to my friends and readers in Arizona, we don’t need that happening anymore. Getting through a grueling 162-game schedule with 84 wins is a perfectly adequate accomplishment, but not one that merits a reward of a trip to the Fall Classic. 

And we have plenty of candidates for that this season. 

The Mets are 80-76. They’ve gone 35-52 since June 12. They’ve gone 18-32 since July 27. Is that a playoff team? 

The Reds are also 80-76 and hold the tiebreaker. They might make the postseason instead of the Mets. They haven’t been more than seven games over .500 all season and are just 30-29 since the All-Star break. They are 11-8 in September but were 12-15 in August. Basically, they’ve just been mediocre all season. 

2025 MLB playoff picture: Baseball standings, tiebreakers, clinch scenarios with Yankees’ magic number at one

Kate Feldman

Of course, behind the Reds we’ve got the Diamondbacks, who were sellers at the trade deadline. Then come the Giants, who are three games under .500 and have gone 36-51 since June 13. The 76-80 Marlins are still alive and staging a furious rally right now — and it would be a disaster if they made a World Series run. 

Perhaps the biggest indictment of the number of playoff spots is the Cardinals. They went 14-14 in June, 8-16 in July, 13-15 in August and are 9-10 in September. They are 26-34 in the second half. They are still technically alive, only four games out of a playoff spot. 

Man, what are we doing? These teams should have been eliminated a week or two ago. 

Over on the American League side, at least the teams in contention for the final berth are trending toward having better final records, but it still wouldn’t have been a problem with only four or five playoff teams. 

Let’s say we went back to the three-division-winners-plus-one-wild-card format. The Yankees would have a three-game lead over the Red Sox for the wild card. The Guardians would still be trailing the Tigers by one game in the AL Central with three head-to-head games coming in Cleveland starting Tuesday, only this time the loser of this race likely falls out of the playoffs instead of having a safety net. The Mariners have a three-game lead over the Astros and probably clinch the AL West, but the Astros would still have had a shot this week. If they can’t pull it off, there’s always the wild card.

Instead, it’s possible either the Tigers or Astros keep losing and still limp their way into a playoff spot after playing awful baseball for three months. 

To reiterate, I understand what MLB is doing. More playoffs teams in a sport that is dominated by regional ratings these days means more fan bases stay involved in the season until the end. Playoff games are excellent theater for casual, general sports fans who don’t care to watch baseball every single day for six months. 

I just wonder about diminishing returns. I’m not suggesting we go back to just the league winners facing off in the World Series or even just having two League Championship Series before the World Series. I just think at some point there are too many playoff teams and it renders the regular season less meaningful than it should be in a sport with a marathon regular season. 

The 2025 National League wild card race is a perfect example of this.