MLB Has Considered In-Season Tournament

Major League Baseball has had conversations about what would be radical changes to the schedule. Commissioner Rob Manfred made an appearance on New York’s WFAN with Craig Carton and Chris McMonigle and identified two possibilities that the league has discussed.

“We’ve talked about split seasons. We’ve talked about in-season tournaments,” Manfred said. “We do understand that 162 (games) is a long pull. I think the difficulty to accomplish those sort of in-season events, you almost inevitably start talking about fewer regular season games. It is a much more complicated thing in our sport than it is in other sports. Because of all of our season-long records, you’re playing around with something that people care a lot about.”

To be clear, it doesn’t appear that either idea is under serious consideration right now. Manfred only addressed the topic when asked directly whether the league would have any interest in something modeled after the NBA Cup. He responded by pointing to the challenges of implementing something similar in baseball, even as he acknowledged that they’ve given the concept some thought within the league offices.

The NBA introduced that in-season tournament during the 2023-24 campaign. It runs for roughly six weeks within the first half of the regular season. It involves every team and begins with group play followed by knockout rounds. Most of the games count towards a team’s regular season record. Players receive a cash bonus for winning or advancing deep into the tournament, and the winning team receives a trophy. The tournament has no impact on playoff seeding (aside from the games counting towards the regular season record).

MLB obviously would not need to follow the NBA model to a tee, nor is it likely they’d do so. The NBA Cup’s knockout rounds, comprised of the final eight teams, are single-elimination games. That’s very different than MLB’s series approach both during the regular season and the playoffs. That makes it more challenging from a scheduling perspective.

Even playing three-game series to determine multiple stages of a knockout round would leave a heavily unbalanced schedule for the clubs that advance. Playing them as single-elimination contests would complicate travel. MLB could carve out a couple weeks to run the tournament and determine that the games don’t count towards a team’s record, but that’d leave the teams that don’t advance with fewer overall games on the schedule. That comes with its own issues from a revenue perspective.

A split-season concept would be easier to implement. That’s in use in the minors all the way up to Triple-A. It essentially divides the season into two halves, each of which has its own winners. Those teams then play one another in the postseason, so a team can clinch a playoff berth by July. That theoretically keeps more fanbases engaged, as a team that plays terribly in April and May would have a fresh start in the second half rather than digging a potentially insurmountable hole.

However, this also raises the possibility that a team finishes second in its division in both halves and has the best overall record while still missing the playoffs (if the division winner in each half played poorly in the other). That happened to the 1981 Reds in MLB. There was a split season that year because of a midseason strike. Cincinnati was the best overall team in the National League but narrowly finished in second place in each half and was excluded from the playoff field.

This seems little more than an aside for now. There’s no harm for MLB in kicking around ideas internally. Even if they wanted to pursue them at some point, they’d need the Players Association to get on board.

A significant change which the league is actively pursuing is expansion. Manfred is planning to retire three years from now and has said he wants the ball rolling on moving from 30 to 32 clubs before he steps away. That’d lead to divisional realignment, likely with geographic conferences that each have four divisions with four teams apiece — as is the case in the NFL.

Manfred said his preference in that situation would be to keep the cities that have two teams (New York, Los Angeles and Chicago) in separate leagues. That’s also the arrangement in the NFL. Manfred will no longer be the commissioner once that comes into place — expansion is a multi-year process that won’t begin before the expiration of the CBA in December — but his comments provide a window into the league’s thinking at the moment.