It was the best of pennant races, it was the worst of pennant races; it was the summer of drama, it was the summer of weariness. Any of these things could be true and we wouldn't have to change a single score from the 2022 regular season.
Right now, after nearly five months of baseball, 18 teams are either in possession of a slot or within seven games of one. That's the story of this season, played under baseball's latest set of rules: a 162-game regular season -- 142 intraleague games and 20 interleague contests for each team -- in a structure of two leagues and six divisions, with six playoff slots up for grabs in each circuit.
But a century ago, baseball was played under different rules. Let's say the extant Major Leagues had kept its original two-league structure, in which only one team from each league made the playoffs. With 30 teams rather than the traditional 16, that would make for some unwieldy standings, but hang with me for a moment.
Most big league cities would be very much looking forward to the upcoming start of the football season. The Houston Astros would hold a narrow three-game lead over the New York Yankees in the American League, but no other club would be closer than 11 games out of the AL's top spot.
In the National League, the picture would even be more grim. The rampaging Los Angeles Dodgers would hold a 7½-game lead over the New York Mets and a 9½-game edge over the Atlanta Braves. The fourth-place St. Louis Cardinals, red hot as they are, would be a distant 14½ games back.
In essence, we'd have three teams battling for the two slots in the World Series, with nearly six weeks left. That, instead, would be the story of the 2022 season.
Format is narrative, and the story of any regular season in a professional league is dictated by the logistics of the structure. Those factors -- league and divisional assignments, playoff format and schedule formula -- inform the narratives we create and remember about any given season.
Which makes this a good time to examine the dynamics of this year's format. As we know, this season the playoff bracket expanded from 10 teams to 12. On Wednesday, we got the details of another fundamental change that we knew was coming, as the new interleague-heavy schedule for the 2023 campaign was released.
Thus, this seems like a good time to consider baseball's evolving format. What's working? What might be tweaked? What stories about the baseball season can we tell -- and what will they look like a year from now?