MLB Makes Necessary Change to Postseason Format; Can NBA, NHL Follow?

For those who watched, the 2023 Major League Baseball postseason was a spectacle.

Both of the league’s championship series went the full seven games, as the Texas Rangers defeated the rival Houston Astros in seven games on the American League side. On the National League side, the favored Philadelphia Phillies lost the final two games of the series to the Arizona Diamondbacks — a stunning upset.

If the potential for a huge upset was one of the advantages of MLB’s expanded postseason, the biggest disadvantage was clear: The 2023 season doesn’t end until Nov. 1. It could easily have lasted longer had the Rangers not defeated the Diamondbacks in five games.

With that in mind, Major League Baseball on Thursday made a small, but long-awaited, adjustment to its postseason schedule.

The World Series opener is Oct. 25, but could be moved to Oct. 22 if the ALCS and NLCS are completed before Oct. 19. That would give both teams at least two full days off — and, crucially, no more. It’s a proactive move by the league that NBA and NHL fans can only hope happens soon enough for their favorite sports.

Why?

The Boston Celtics had a whopping 10 days off in mid-June before taking on the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA Finals. The Mavericks themselves had seven days off. The reason: By sticking to a set start time, the NBA added a layer of predictability to the Finals schedule, a nice bit of certainty for the league’s broadcast partners — and a few others.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the first time the NBA schedule was halted for an entire week, right in the middle of the biggest primetime event on the calendar.

The Golden State Warriors (10 days) and Cleveland Cavailers (seven) took a full week off before their Finals game in 2017. The Nets had 11 days off before facing the Spurs in 2003.

The problem isn’t that the halftime differential unfairly favors one team. The problem is that the schedule is getting really boring when fans least want it, while the media that covers every sport has to pump out hyped-up storylines to buy time.

Last year, this problem wasn’t as bad in the NHL: the Edmonton Oilers had a whopping five days off for the Stanley Cup Final, the Florida Panthers six. But the NHL occasionally suffers from the same problem, setting a fixed date for Game 1 of the championship series.

Now, MLB has decided to do something about it. The season will likely not drag on into November, when football is already the focus. The World Series will be better positioned to maintain its momentum in the public consciousness, and the players will also have longer offseasons — a win-win for everyone involved.

Let’s hope the NBA and NHL follow suit.