For the first time ever, more than half of the league will make the MLB playoffs.
Hours before the first pitch deadline, Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association agreed Thursday to expand the playoffs to 16 teams for the 2020 season.
Under the new format, each division winner and runner-up will make their league's postseason cut, with the seventh and eighth teams to be determined by the teams with the two best remaining records regardless of division.
"This season will be a sprint to a new format that will allow more fans to experience playoff baseball," Commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement announcing the expansion. "We look forward to a memorable Postseason concluding a year like no other."
"We hope it will result in highly competitive pennant races as well as exciting additional playoff games to the benefit of the industry and all involved heading into next year," MLBPA executive director Tony Clark said in the statement.
There had been speculation that the higher seeds would be able to pick their first-round opponents, but the commissioner confirmed on ESPN during their broadcast of the Nationals-Yankees season opener that the matchups will all be based on straight seeding.
All first-round series, which will be played Sept. 29-Oct. 2, will be best-of-three, with all three games at the home of the higher seed, before moving into the traditional five-game Division Series and seven-game League Championship Series and World Series format.
This is a stark change for this year only, one in which anything can and probably will happen, but in historical perspective, Elias Sports Bureau notes that if eight teams qualified for the playoffs in each league during the Wild Card era (1995-2019), 46 teams at or below .500 would have made the postseason, and there would have been only three seasons in which all playoff teams would have had winning records: 2000, 2003 and 2009.
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