The Expanded MLB Wild Card Round is A Home Run

Grimace, the oafish McDonald's mascot, may be Shohei Ohtani’s most serious challenger for National League Most Valuable Player.

OK, so that discredits the players much more integral to the New York Mets’ resurgence than that purple, hamburger-loving goof. But when Grimace threw out the ceremonial first pitch ahead of an otherwise easily ignored June 12 matchup between the Mets and Miami Marlins, New York was 29-37 and just two weeks removed from losing 8 of 9.

The Mets went on a 60-46 tear from that point onward in the regular season, starting with a six-game winning streak that began on the day of Grimace’s opening pitch.

New York rode that momentum into the National League’s final Wild Card berth. Thanks to an elimination game against the Central Division champion Milwaukee Brewers that emulated the Mets’ regular season—a concerning start flipped with an odds-defying back half—they are in the National League Divisional Series against the Philadelphia Phillies.

It’s the first time the NL East rivals have ever met in the postseason, promising some thrilling new installments in the lore of playoff baseball since its expansion in 1995.

New York’s counterpart as the No. 6 seed in the American League, the Detroit Tigers, similarly turned around a seemingly lost season in a moment of childlike exuberance.

Williamsport, Pennsylvania, is the perfect spot for one of baseball’s youngest lineups to have kicked off the symbolic start of an unlikely push to the playoffs. In August’s Little League Classic, Parker Meadows singled in the 10th inning to drive in Zach McKinstry and cap a 3-2 Tigers win over the New York Yankees.

Detroit ended the regular season as the American League’s hottest team, going an incredible 31-13 from August 11 on. The Tigers were just 55-63 when they dropped their third straight on a West Coast road swing one week before descending on Williamsport.

Their run that began in mid-August rolled into the Wild Card round with the Houston Astros, a series that offered a stark contrast in team makeup. The star-studded Astros lineup represented baseball’s most consistent organization of the last decade—a franchise with a methodical, businesslike approach.

And Houston was outclassed in a two-game sweep by the hungry young Tigers.

Detroit now heads into a Little League Classic rematch with the Yankees in the ALDS¹. In a professional sport with an exceedingly long regular season, the Tigers’ run to set up this series with New York feels about as close to a March Madness Cinderella story as imaginable, given the format.

It’s a format for which I initially harbored some skepticism. Oversaturation is a real thing; when it comes to sports’ best postseason, the aforementioned NCAA Tournament, the 68-into-64-team format is perfect. Suggestions of expanding to 96 threaten to dilute the brand for the sake of 17-win power-conference programs.

Consider the NBA. The introduction of the play-in round during the COVID-19 bubble season expanded an already watered-down playoff to last an additional week. The NBA playoffs now span nearly 2 1/2 months.

And while the Stanley Cup playoffs last about as long and maintain a high level of energy from start to finish, the NBA’s postseason feels like a slog to the inevitable. The best-of-seven format isn’t conducive to March Madness-style upsets; pro basketball doesn’t have the same variability as hockey, which can be found in a red-hot goalie carrying an underdog on a deep run, and the prevailing mindset in the game is that making the playoffs isn’t an achievement to celebrate.

Put simply, I worried that Major League Baseball expanding to include two additional Wild Cards risked turning the second-best postseason in sports into something more closely resembling the NBA playoffs. I’m thrilled to be wrong.

On the contrary, the limited sample size suggests the expanded postseason isn’t just a boon to the playoffs but a huge positive for the regular season as well. Organizations comparable to the 2024 Mets and even more so this year’s Tigers would have had the incentive to wave the white flag.

Whereas reaching the NBA playoffs isn’t an achievement—even being an organization consistently in the 4-6 seed range, like the Toronto Raptors, often results in them blowing it up nowadays—qualifying for the MLB postseason was such an achievement it became unattainable for a good 20 or so teams each year.

I became a lapsed baseball fan in the 2010s—a topic on which I have been writing a deeply personal essay that will drop soon in this newsletter—and the exclusivity of the playoffs played a part, I have come to realize in hindsight. One hundred sixty-two games of futility is a lot of damn futility.

Major League Baseball also lost some of its identity in the previous decade. This season’s Wild Card teams recapture an essence missing from the game. A San Diego Padres team playing in memory of late owner Peter Seidler has energized a city repeatedly jilted by the business side of sports, most recently and most devastatingly by the NFL.

The Kansas City Royals engineered a remarkable, single-season turnaround behind Bobby Witt Jr., a multi-skilled standout poised to fill the league’s marketable star gap. The Royals leveraging their Wild Card opportunity with a sweep of the Baltimore Orioles and a shot at the Cleveland Guardians in the NLDS introduces Witt to a whole new audience.

The Mets came alive thanks to their own superstar deserving of the national stage — and no, it’s not Grimace. Francisco Lindor will almost assuredly finish second in NL MVP voting behind Shohei Ohtani, and Lindor’s combination of hitting and base-stealing could set up an LCS showdown with Ohtani and the Dodgers.

And then there’s Detroit. From the eruption of the Little Leaguers in attendance, to the Tigers’ own celebration in the aftermath, the Little League Classic embodied the core element of baseball that the Major League game was most fundamentally lacking in recent years: Joy.

Expanding the Wild Card in turn expanded the significance of regular-season baseball. With more games of genuine consequence comes more genuine emotion. Arguably, no sport is more defined by or reliant on emotion than baseball.

To that end, the revamped Wild Card format didn’t denigrate baseball’s past; the Wild Card’s recaptured some magic of the game’s past. We have Grimace to thank for that.

1. Editing note: Detroit advanced to face Cleveland, not New York.