Look at it. It’s disgusting.
The new “balanced” regular season schedule was introduced, allegedly, to make records more directly comparable. Intra-division games were slashed and intra-league play was more than doubled. The basic flaw is on display in the picture. The regular season was “de-divisionalized,” but the playoffs weren’t. The abomination that is the 81-81 Houston Astros (still stocked with garbage-can-bangers) “won” their division despite not being a winning team, and will enjoy home-field advantage over a team that is better than them. But not that much better! Indeed the White Sox won 84 games and finished second in the Central behind a, whomp-whomp, 85-win Cleveland team.
All three teams coming out of the AL East are better than all three teams from the Central and West, and all three AL East teams are stuck in the same quadrant of the bracket. That means two teams from the East will fail to advance to the ALCS despite never having a chance to wallop on any of their inferiors from the other two divisions. And all for the privilege of losing to the Dodgers!
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred hates baseball; this is well-known. But he’s also a Mugwump, a fence-sitter without the courage of his radical convictions, with his mug on one side of the “balanced” schedule and his wump on the other.