During the 2023 regular season, Major League Baseball's 30 teams combined for 4,860 games across 43,087 2/3 innings. Batters came to the plate 184,104 times and were confronted by 718,247 pitches; 459,201 of those were strikes. There was nothing unusual about that.
MLB's six-month regular season, in which each team plays 162 games, is unexampled among major team sports in its depth and breadth. The everyday-ness of the MLB schedule is its defining characteristic, and so is the absolute sprawl of it. It's probably time we view it with fresh appreciation and exalt those teams who withstand it better than the rest. Maybe the recent conclusion of the 2023 season -- with two wild-card entrants in the World Series and an opening-round exit for the regular-season colossus from Atlanta -- is a fine occasion to do so.
Time was when genuine greatness in the regular season was a requirement to make it to the World Series. This was in the days when the best team from each league advanced to the Fall Classic. That exacting structure, which had prevailed since 1903, ended in 1969 with the advent of divisional play and the institution of the League Championship Series. That meant the postseason field doubled from two teams to four. In 1995, wild-card teams were added, and the playoffs grew to eight teams and three rounds.
The next growth spurt came in 2012 with the Wild Card Game and an additional wild-card team in each league. That made for 10 playoff teams. That brings us to 2022 and wild-card expansion. That's the 12-team field that's presently in place. This is to say nothing of one-off playoff structures for 1981, which was complicated by a lengthy labor stoppage, and 2020, which was shortened to a 60-game regular season because of COVID.
The present reality is that it's easier than ever for a team to make the postseason in MLB, and by extension it's harder than ever for the best team to win it all. Baseball has so much structural parity and so much inherent randomness that you never see the yawning divide between best and worst that you do in other team sports. We'll even see fluke-ish outcomes across the full 162 games. Pare that sample size down to a sliver in the playoffs, and you get lightning strike upon lightning strike.
Note that all of this doesn't flow from some of the mewling coming from the 104-win Braves, their fans, and their proxies in the media about how harmful the relatively short layoff between the end of the regular season and the start of the Division Series was to their title hopes. The need to appreciate regular-season accomplishment predates that weirdness and bears no relationship to that particular suite of grievances. Indeed, this author made a similar call to action within the pages of the Baseball Prospectus annual back in 2016.
No, this is about the gradual erosion of regular-season importance and its relationship to winning it all. Need some evidence? Since the postseason first expanded in 1969, just 13 of 55 World Series trophies have gone to the squadron with the best record in that respective regular season. The predictably glib response will be along the lines of "then those teams should have been better in the playoffs." This, however, ignores the key differences between the regular season and what's in essence an end-of-season tournament. Like all pat certainties, it's also easily reversible: "No, the World Series winner should've proved its worth by being better during the regular season."
This devaluation of the regular season is also a trend that will become even more pronounced in the years to come as the playoffs get more and more bloated in the name of increasing the value of media-rights contracts. So how do we repair this? How do we correct for the devaluing of baseball's flagship distinction? Folks, we conjure up a trophy for it.
There's plenty of precedent for such a thing. At the individual level in MLB, we bestow upon players an MVP award for both regular-season performance and postseason performances in the LCS and World Series. Why not do so at the team level? Some will surely quip that the whole point is to win the World Series, but that is also presumably the whole point for individual players. We still find a way to honor their regular-season performances. One could also counter-argue that the whole point is not to just win the World Series but also to win as many games as possible. On another level, no less a circuit than England's Premier League determines the annual champion based on regular-season performance. None of this is unexplored territory.
In baseball, nothing is ever going to replace the glory and dog piles of World Series triumph, but there can be space to celebrate a team's mettle tested across the end of spring, the fullness of summer, and the early days of fall. That's when true greatness is achieved.
Since the World Series winner gets the Commissioner's Trophy, the team with the best regular-season record each year shall get the Players' Trophy in this imagined reality. Call it fitting to honor greatness built day after day with a prize named for those who authored it -- the players themselves.
At this point, it's time to retroactively award the Players' Trophy to the teams that earned it. The team with the highest winning percentage during the regular season of note gets the hardware. In the case of tie, run differential will be the first tiebreaker. If that doesn't do it, then head-to-head record will come into play, if applicable. If that doesn't settle matters, then they'll share the crown (you'll soon see that this is yet to happen).
We'll go back until 1969, when the postseason first expanded beyond the two pennant-winners. An asterisk (*) indicates that the Players' Trophy winner that year also went on to win the World Series. A plus sign (+) means the Players' Trophy winner for that season won the honor via tiebreaker. Now for the list of honorees:
| Year | Players' Trophy winner | Record |
|---|---|---|
1969 | Baltimore Orioles | 109-53 |
1970 | Baltimore Orioles* | 108-54 |
1971 | Baltimore Orioles | 101-57 |
1972 | Pittsburgh Pirates | 96-59 |
1973 | Cincinnati Reds | 99-63 |
1974 | Los Angeles Dodgers | 102-60 |
1975 | Cincinnati Reds* | 108-54 |
1976 | Cincinnati Reds* | 102-60 |
1977 | Kansas City Royals | 102-60 |
1978 | New York Yankees* | 100-63 |
1979 | Baltimore Orioles | 102-57 |
1980 | New York Yankees | 103-59 |
1981 | Cincinnati Reds | 66-42 |
1982 | Milwaukee Brewers | 95-67 |
1983 | Chicago White Sox | 99-63 |
1984 | Detroit Tigers* | 104-58 |
1985 | St. Louis Cardinals | 101-61 |
1986 | New York Mets* | 108-54 |
1987 | Detroit Tigers | 98-64 |
1988 | Oakland Athletics | 104-58 |
1989 | Oakland Athletics* | 99-63 |
1990 | Oakland Athletics | 103-59 |
1991 | Pittsburgh Pirates | 98-64 |
1992 | Atlanta Braves | 98-64 |
1993 | Atlanta Braves | 104-58 |
1994 | Montreal Expos | 74-40 |
1995 | Cleveland Indians | 100-44 |
1996 | Cleveland Indians | 99-62 |
1997 | Atlanta Braves | 101-61 |
1998 | New York Yankees* | 114-48 |
1999 | Atlanta Braves | 103-59 |
2000 | San Francisco Giants | 97-65 |
2001 | Seattle Mariners | 116-46 |
2002 | New York Yankees | 103-58 |
2003 | Atlanta Braves+ | 101-61 |
2004 | St. Louis Cardinals | 105-57 |
2005 | St. Louis Cardinals | 100-62 |
2006 | New York Yankees+ | 97-65 |
2007 | Boston Red Sox*+ | 96-66 |
2008 | Los Angeles Angels | 100-62 |
2009 | New York Yankees* | 103-69 |
2010 | Philadelphia Phillies | 97-65 |
2011 | Philadelphia Phillies | 102-60 |
2012 | Washington Nationals | 98-64 |
2013 | St. Louis Cardinals+ | 97-65 |
2014 | Los Angeles Angels | 98-64 |
2015 | St. Louis Cardinals | 100-62 |
2016 | Chicago Cubs* | 103-58 |
2017 | Los Angeles Dodgers | 104-58 |
2018 | Boston Red Sox* | 108-54 |
2019 | Houston Astros | 107-55 |
2020 | Los Angeles Dodgers* | 43-17 |
2021 | San Francisco Giants | 107-55 |
2022 | Los Angeles Dodgers | 111-51 |
2023 | Atlanta Braves | 104-58 |
The Yankees and Braves lead all comers with six Players' Trophies apiece over this span. The Cardinals pull up just behind them with five.
Let's highlight for a moment that 1981 season you see above, as it provides an object lesson in How Things Should Be. That season was heavily compromised by a 50-day labor stoppage, and league decision-makers inexplicably landed on a playoff format that split the season and populated the playoffs with division winners from the first and second halves. As a somewhat predictable unintended consequence, the two teams with the best records in the NL -- the Reds and Cardinals -- were excluded from the playoffs because they didn't "win" their division in either half of the split season.
The Reds with their MLB-best record noted above chose the appropriate rejoinder to such injustice:
In the strike shortened 1981 season, the Cincinnati Reds finished with the best record in the MLB (66-42) but still missed the playoffs. pic.twitter.com/OZ3wsSGm5U
— Straight Facts (@Str8Facts_Pod) March 26, 2020
This, people, is the way -- righteous celebration of regular-season triumph. If only the Players' Trophy had been around in those days…
While this writer believes that regular-season excellence -- i.e., six months of triumph -- is more meaningful than than playoff excellence -- i.e., one month of triumph -- this isn't to suggest that the Players' Trophy should replace the Commissioner's Trophy. Rather, it's a celebration of a separate route to greatness, one that's in so many ways unique to baseball as it's played at the highest level.
Let's restore some of the glory to regular-season greatness by honoring it as such. Let's bring about the Players' Trophy.
