Expert: Tom Schott - 4/27/2010

Question
Tom,

No worries man, my friend Marc pointed out the 1981 season as a good example given the quirky strike rules, and sure enough he was right.  The Royals made the playoffs with a dismal 19-28 home record.  

This got me thinking about the strike and the amended rules:  Do you know what would have happened if a team finished 1st in both halves of the season?  Did the 2nd place team get a playoff nod?  Or did that team have a bye?

Answer
Hi Jeremy,

The 1981 season was an abomination, no matter how you look at it. I could not remember what the rules were that year without looking them up. But the writeup in Wikipedia is pretty good on this. Here it is:

The split-season format

Due to the two-month strike, the owners tried to create an equitable solution. So on August 6, the owners decided to split the 1981 season into two halves, with the first-place teams from each half in each division (or a wild card team if the same club won both halves) meeting in a best-of-five divisional playoff series. The four survivors would then move on to the two best-of-five League Championship Series. It was the first time that Major League Baseball used a split-season format since 1892.

Flaws
The split-season idea as put into practice (although garnering the league more playoff revenue) seemed to cheapen the results of the regular season. As first proposed, if a team won its division in both halves of the season, then it would play the team with the second best record overall (first and second half). A sportswriter pointed out that the arrangement would give a team with a good overall record an incentive to lose games against the first-half winner to help a division rival win both halves. On August 20, Major League Baseball revised the rules so that if a team won both halves of the season, it would face the second season runner-up instead.
Facing a playoff no matter their finish in the second half, the first-half winners lacked incentive (as opposed to the minor leagues, where if the same team did win both halves it was given a bye into the next round) to repeat, and finished the second-half of the season with a composite record of only three games above .500. To make matters worse, the Cincinnati Reds (National League West) and St. Louis Cardinals (National League East) each failed to make the playoffs. This was despite the fact that they had the two best full-season records in the National League that season. In contrast to the Reds' and Cardinals' bad luck, the Kansas City Royals made the postseason despite owning the fourth-best full-season record in their division and posting a losing record overall (50-53).