MLB expands 2020 postseason to 16 teams, includes best-of-3 first round
Major League Baseball is expanding the 2020 playoff field.
The league and the players' association announced that the 2020 postseason will feature 16 teams in a new format following the pandemic-shortened season. Both parties ratified the proposal Thursday, hours before the season-opening game.
"The opportunity to add playoff games in this already-abbreviated season makes sense for fans, the league, and players," MLBPA executive director Tony Clark said. "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."
In the new format, playoff teams in each league will be seeded one through eight. The first- and second-place teams in each division will qualify as the top six seeds; the top three seeds will be given to division winners, while second-place clubs will qualify for the next three seeds. The final two spots in each league will be filled by the two teams with the best records among the remaining clubs.
There will be no one-game tiebreakers in 2020, according to Anthony Castrovince of MLB.com. Any ties in the standings will be broken mathematically.
The first round, officially called the Wild Card Series, will be a best-of-three format. The eight Wild Card Series matchups will be contested from Sept. 29 to Oct. 2, with the higher seed holding home-field advantage for all three games.
Wild Card Series winners will then advance to the best-of-five Division Series, and the remainder of the playoffs will proceed as usual.
If every postseason series goes the distance in a 16-team format (best-of-3, best-of-5, best-of-7, best-of-7), there would be 65 postseason games this year.
— Jayson Stark (@jaysonst) July 23, 2020
There were 66 in the entire decade of the 1960s.
This new format will only be used during the 2020 campaign, according to ESPN's Marly Rivera.
Players will receive a $50-million postseason bonus pool as part of the agreement, Evan Drellich of The Athletic reports.
Owners and players began last-minute negotiations for expanded playoffs Wednesday, less than 24 hours before the pandemic-shortened 2020 season was set to begin. Any agreement needed be ratified before first pitch of the season-opening game at 7:08 p.m. ET on Thursday.
MLB last expanded the playoffs in 2012 when it added a second wild-card team in each league and a one-game wild-card playoff.