In 2023, the Milwaukee Brewers won 92 regular season games, which gave them the fifth-best record in Major League Baseball. Finishing ahead of Milwaukee in the standings were, respectively, the 99-win Tampa Bay Rays, the 100-win Los Angeles Dodgers, the 101-win Baltimore Orioles, and the 104-win Atlanta Braves. And with the MLB postseason field reduced down to four, these teams combined to win one postseason game. The remaining field consists of three 90-win teams, only one of which won its division, and an 84-win team which surrendered 15 more runs in the 2023 regular season than they scored.

For the first sixty-five editions of formalized American League and National League postseason play, only two teams competed in one round of playoffs–the champion of the American League and the champion of the National League would play the World Series and a winner was crowned. And although there would be occasionally large disparities in win totals between the champions of the two leagues, this did not necessarily mean that the team with fewer wins coming out on top was an unjust outcome–since the two leagues did not compete yet in interleague play throughout the regular season, this would be like claiming a team that went 8-0 in the Sun Belt Conference of college football is superior to a team that went 7-1 in the Southeastern Conference–their schedules differed dramatically and if the SEC team won a matchup (they would be considerable favorites, for anyone who is not college football versed), this doesn’t mean the lesser team won.

But in the subsequent decades, the size of the postseason has expanded dramatically. For the first nearly six decades of the World Series era, 12.5% of teams made the postseason; today, that number is 40%. And while there are more inherent advantages to having a stronger regular season in 2023 than there were in the two-team postseason era, namely automatic qualification for the League Division Series and home-field advantage throughout the postseason for the team with a superior regular-season record, the randomness of postseason baseball has given the sport, which once had an extremely significant regular season, a sense of arbitrariness.

There are two common grievances here, one of which I find ridiculous and the other which I at the very least understand. The first grievance is that teams with a first-round bye are at a disadvantage because of the incalculable impacts of rust and in-season momentum. And it should be noted that while the National League playoffs of 2022 were fairly chaotic, with the NLCS being a triumph of the league’s #6 seed over the league’s #5 seed, the American League postseason went mostly according to plan–aside from a Seattle Mariners “upset” over a Toronto Blue Jays team which won a grand total of two more regular season games, the two teams with a bye won their first-round matchups and then the 106-win Houston Astros won the American League pennant and, of course, the World Series. And while I certainly understand anyone who roots against the Houston Astros on grounds of ethics or just plain ol’ “I just don’t like them that’s why”, it would be very difficult to argue that they were not fairly deserving of their title, even if you thought the Los Angeles Dodgers were a little bit better.

The second grievance is one to which I am more sympathetic, which is the belief that even if the superior regular season teams do have a better-than-even chance of winning any given game or round, which I believe they do, their odds are not nearly reflective of what is deserved. This is arbitrary but intuitive–we aren’t even a week and a half removed from baseball fans freaking out that Seattle Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry DiPoto cited that his goal was to build a team that wins 54% of the time, a mark which would put the Mariners’ record right in the heart of where the remaining playoff teams finished. If a team does not strive to win as many games as possible–consider how much criticism the Los Angeles Dodgers faced for their relatively inactive 2022-23 off-season, criticism which continued even as the team still won 100 games–it is considered a dereliction of duty. And yet if a team does what the Atlanta Braves did–win 101 games in 2022 and still proceed to trade for the arguable best catcher in baseball–and fails to convert a superior regular season into postseason success, this is also considered a moral failing, even if losing three of four games is something the Braves managed to do in 2023 to the sub-.500 San Diego Padres.

An unspoken truth of sports is that, if a team makes the postseason, they will, barring a championship, end their season with a loss. The St. Louis Cardinals ended their 2019 through 2022 seasons with a loss and, despite finishing twenty games under .500 in 2023, finished it with a win. A fun example of this phenomenon is Ray Bourque, conservatively on the Mount Rushmore of all-time NHL defensemen. Bourque played twenty-one seasons in the NHL, and in only two of them did he finish his season with a win: in his 17th season, when his Boston Bruins finished with the lowest point total in the entire league, and in his 21st season, when his Colorado Avalanche won the Stanley Cup. But of course, nobody is considering the 2023 Cardinals nor the 1996-97 Bruins a triumph, which leaves every season with one team that is allowed to be happy.

It’s not just that any season that does not end with a championship feels like it could have been more, which is a natural and avoidable feelings–it’s that it is considered a character flaw to view it as anything but failure. As a St. Louis Cardinals fan, I feel as though I am uniquely qualified to comment on the following: there are great seasons without championships and there are mediocre seasons with championships.

The 2004 St. Louis Cardinals were, on a day-in day-out basis, about as enjoyable as one could invent, winning 105 games thanks to the contributions of the true, fully-functional MV3 (Jim Edmonds and Scott Rolen had their best career seasons, and while Albert Pujols did not, that’s more of a reflection on his prior and future greatness than any demerits one could pin on him). The bullpen was solid, and the starting rotation saw the surprising ascents of Chris Carpenter and Jason Marquis. They won a do-or-die NLCS Game 6 with a walk-off home run and Jeff Suppan out-dueled Roger Clemens in Game 7 to send the Cardinals to the first World Series of my lifetime.

By contrast, the 2006 Cardinals were often frustrating. Aside from Albert Pujols, Scott Rolen, and Chris Carpenter, every spot on the roster felt like a diminished version of what the team had fielded in the past two seasons. With eleven games remaining in the season, the Cardinals had a seven-game lead in the NL Central and they still nearly blew it, stumbling into the postseason despite themselves with a 83-78. And then they won the World Series. Certainly I enjoyed the 2006 World Series more than the 2004 one, but as a complete experience, I would take 2004 eleven times out of ten.

As a post-mortem to the seasons of the eliminated teams, most notably the Atlanta Braves, we have gotten an extremely dumbed-down version of sports analysis, where Atlanta’s consecutive postseason losses to Philadelphia are a reflection of a lack of intestinal fortitude rather than a reflection on how long it takes for baseball records to stabilize (far longer than four games). It’s understandable why that is–Philadelphians want to believe that their victory is because they Got That Dog In Them rather than a fluke, and even Atlantans would prefer an explanation that doesn’t boil down to them spending six months on a regular season that ultimately did not matter.

I am, by nature, a small postseason preferer. Having grown up in the Wild Card era, I cannot relate to pining for a two-team postseason on a personal level, but I can relate to preferring a two-team college football postseason to the current four-team one and certainly to the coming expansion. Yes, postseason games are more games to watch, but it dilutes the value of the bulk of the season, and for me, the entire reason I’ve preferred in general to watch the objectively inferior product of the college game is because every game just matters so much. It makes the entire three-ish month regular season, effectively, a playoff. Due to the size of Major League Baseball, I can understand that a two-team playoff may no longer be practical, but surely a four-team one could work. And the Braves/Dodgers and Orioles/Astros sets would be a ton of fun. But this also isn’t practical.

I’m not certain that MLB’s postseason will ever expand, but I am quite certain that it will never contract. There is simply too much money on the table for the league in expanded postseason. Outside of playoff contraction, the primary theory for how to assist regular season juggernauts involves the nonsensical strategy of giving them more chances to be eliminated. The playoff system is no longer designed to provide a “fair” champion. It is designed to be fun, and as long as there are some stakes assigned to it, it remains so. The key is to stop treating the postseason as the only thing that matters.

In the most popular non-American sports league in the world, the Premier League for English soccer, there is no postseason–each team plays each team twice, with each team getting a home match and each playing away–and emerging with the highest number of points is the pinnacle of regular season domestic success. There are tournaments–most notably the FA Cup, a massive single-elimination tournament involving not only the Premier League but the next nine levels of English soccer. In 2011-12, 763 clubs entered the tournament, from 10th division Nuneaton Griff F.C. to defending Premier League champions Manchester United. The FA Cup is almost always won by one of the handful of best teams in the country, but the sheer volume of teams and the random noise that can occur in one match (which, mind you, is considerably less than can occur in one or even seven baseball games) assures that this will never be as prestigious as winning the Premier League.

In the 1999-00 NHL season, the St. Louis Blues totaled an NHL-high 114 points. Roman Turek posted a sub-2 goals against average, forwards Pierre Turgeon and the late, great Pavol Demitra averaged more than a point per game, and defenseman Chris Pronger won the Hart Memorial Trophy as the league’s MVP. And when the Blues lost in the first round in seven games to the San Jose Sharks, that the Blues had won the league’s Presidents Trophy was considered, if anything, a mark of shame. Now, to be clear, I preferred the 2018-19 Stanley Cup-winning Blues season to the crushing disappointment which followed 1999-00, but why should 1999-00 be regarded as more shameful than any number of less successful seasons which were followed by first-round exists? Should I view the 2001 St. Louis Rams, who went 14-2, on equal terms with the 2009 St. Louis Rams, who went 1-15, because each season ended with a loss (on a last-second field goal in the Super Bowl to the burgeoning greatest NFL dynasty ever, and by 22 points at home to a mediocre San Francisco 49ers team to mark the ninth time all season they scored 10 or fewer points, respectively)?

The dirty little secret about sports leagues is that none of these results actually matter. Winning the World Series does not assure future success nor is an early exit a harbinger of future failure. And if fans cannot enjoy the ride, they are going to wind up miserable. At least in North American major professional sports, no team wins a title nearly as often as they do not win that title, therefore making the whole practice a misery machine if championship-or-bust is viewed as the modus operandi. And sports are supposed to be fun. They aren’t worth your investment if the joy of a great season can be so easily erased.