As a relatively young baseball fan, I pride myself and think of myself as a supporter of many of the game’s modern innovations and rule changes. Larger bases, the universal designated hitter and the pitch clock — especially the pitch clock — have all made baseball a far more entertaining sport to watch in recent years.

One change I hate, however, is the new playoff format. Specifically, the new Wild Card.

I guess it isn’t that “new” anymore; the idea of three games before the Division Series was first tested during the 2020 postseason, and MLB officially implemented the current format starting in 2022. For four years now, 12 teams have made the MLB postseason, with the last four teams in each league facing each other in a best-of-three Wild Card Series.

Wild Card … “Series?” That’s not the baseball I know and love. From 2012 until 2021, 10 teams advanced to the postseason: Each league had its three division champions, as well as the next two highest-ranking teams. Those two teams would play each other in a single Wild Card Game, with the winner moving on to the Division Series and the loser going home.

This is the format I remember growing up with, and it was glorious. One game, winner-take-all. No “try again tomorrow” nonsense. No “division winner playing in the wild card” gibberish. No “the 83-79 Cincinnati Reds get to play two playoff games” mumbo jumbo.

That’s my biggest complaint about the new format: The playoffs are simply getting too crowded. MLB has gone from hosting two playoff teams to four to eight to 10 to now 12. Twelve teams! That line about the Reds wasn’t a joke — they were under .500 as recently as Sept. 16 and still managed to secure a Wild Card spot against the Los Angeles Dodgers, who unsurprisingly dominated Cincinnati in two highly unentertaining games.

In a sport featuring as grueling of a schedule as baseball, the regular season needs to actually mean something. A team shouldn’t be allowed to serve as the poster boy for mediocrity for 162 games just to wind up with the exact same playoff positioning as a 93-win division champion.

Speaking of those two unentertaining games, that’s another big problem: The Wild Card Series hasn’t actually been that fun to watch! Since 2022, there have been a total of 16 series played under this format; of those 16, a whopping five of them went to three games. Nearly 70% of these series have been in-and-out, two-game sweeps. Not quite my definition of excitement.

To make matters worse, of the 16 teams that won their first games, 15 of them went on to win the overall series. Only one team, the 2025 New York Yankees, has managed to come back from a 1-0 deficit. At that point, why not just stick to the single-game format of yore?

Money, of course. How else would the Dodgers pay off Shohei Ohtani’s $700 million contract? MLB ownership loves nothing if not money, and adding a few extra playoff games to the schedule certainly doesn’t hurt.

At a certain point, the continued expansion of the MLB postseason feels like an attempt to replicate the absolute magic that is March Madness. It’s a noble pursuit, to be fair; the first four days of the NCAA Tournament are arguably the four greatest days of the year, rivaled only by Christmas and, well, Selection Sunday.

But there are two main differences that set March Madness apart. For one, the NCAA Tournament features 68 of the 364 Division I programs — less than 19%, as compared to the now 40% of MLB teams that make the playoffs. Secondly, a college basketball team plays less than one-fifth the games of an MLB team; the sample size isn’t big enough for a spot in the Big Dance to truly feel unearned as it may in baseball.

Now that I think about it, maybe I’m just upset that nothing went my way in this year’s Wild Card. Three of my least favorite teams advanced: the Chicago Cubs, Yankees and — with apologies to the heavily L.A.-based Daily Trojan readership — Dodgers. And, in the only series without a team I particularly hate, the Cleveland Guardians completely lost the sauce that propelled them to a magical September comeback.

I mean, seriously, what’s up with that? The Guardians pulled off the single biggest divisional comeback in MLB history — beating out the Detroit Tigers for first place in the American League Central after being 11 games back on Sept. 5 — just to fall to those same Tigers as soon as the calendar turned to October. That’s just bad writing! Can you imagine if “Moneyball” (2011) had ended with the Athletics losing in their very first playoff series?

Oh, wait.

Whatever. At least we’re getting a postseason in the first place! Given the way negotiations are looking between MLB owners and the players’ union, there may not be a 2027 season at all. I guess I should just appreciate what I’ve got while I still have it … even if it’s still a pretty goofy format.

Bennett Christofferson is a junior writing about baseball’s biggest stories and controversies in his column “Dugout Diaries,” which typically runs every other Thursday. He is also a sports editor at the Daily Trojan.