Best-of-five baseball series prove nothing
Best-of-five baseball series are travesties- and I'm not just saying that because my Cubs are down two games to none in the NLDS.
With the advent of the wild card, baseball essentially stopped pretending that the result of the post-season was supposed to have very much to do with merit, anyway. The proliferation of hoops a team had to jump through to reach the World Series further contributed to the degree to which getting hot at the right time, or simply dumb luck, really decides who winds up being world champions.
But baseball plays a long season for a reason. It's the nature of the game that one game- or even two or three- proves very little; it's only over the long haul that the true merits of a team are tested. And any series shorter than best-of-seven is really more of a crap shoot than a contest. If there must be divisional series, they need to be best of seven, just like the LCS and the World Series itself.
With the advent of the wild card, baseball essentially stopped pretending that the result of the post-season was supposed to have very much to do with merit, anyway. The proliferation of hoops a team had to jump through to reach the World Series further contributed to the degree to which getting hot at the right time, or simply dumb luck, really decides who winds up being world champions.
But baseball plays a long season for a reason. It's the nature of the game that one game- or even two or three- proves very little; it's only over the long haul that the true merits of a team are tested. And any series shorter than best-of-seven is really more of a crap shoot than a contest. If there must be divisional series, they need to be best of seven, just like the LCS and the World Series itself.
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