Playoffs

I was wondering the same thing after reading it. How can he even call it silly. I thought it was wonderful, having the top 2 teams in Japan fight for the Japan Championship.

But if they want only League Champions then they can have a seperate series for League Leaders alone.

I surely liked the idea of 2 teams from each division fights across each other.

But one thing they have to make sure is that both teams going into finals must have same number of games played. Unlike last year. That was very sad for the Tigers.

Although this was just a throwaway paragraph, I'd just like to note the assumption in the article:

Some may call it heresy to have Japan's title decided by two teams in the same league. But the way things stand now, that is what the Pacific League playoffs have done. As long as CL champs rust while the PL champions play the most intense games of the season, the CL champs will be poorly prepared to compete.

With higher seeds given a bye in the playoffs, it's not proven whether the rest benefits them or makes them rusty (and the team playing earlier rounds of the playoffs, ie. PL champ in our case, benefits from the momentum or suffers from fatigue).

Anyways, with only 12 teams, I'd much rather see just one league of 12 teams (hold a separate Japan Series tournament, like Cup competitions in soccer). If they insist on having the playoffs and Japan Series, then 3 divisions of 4 teams each. But I know that both these ideas are pipedreams.

It's difficult to justify a valid playoff system in NPB, but it does sure add excitement to the end of the season, even if the best team through the season does not win. Emphasizing entertainment above all else? Sounds like the 21st century.

I've said this many times before, but the only "silliness" for me is that each league has a different playoff system. It doesn't matter what form it takes, but the two leagues have to agree on something and stick to it.

It doesn't help that the PL keeps on revising the system because the first place Hawks keep on losing in the playoffs. If they want the first place team to win that badly, scrap the playoffs altogether. Quite silly.

I think the Pacific League introduced their playoff system out of desperation more than anything else. They don't have the pulling power of the Central League, and certainly don't have anything to equal the Kanto/Kansai rivalry of the Giants/Tigers. They conceived a flawed system which has a built in absurdity of the possibility of a sub .500 team winning the league.

Once they had introduced this system they couldn't replace it without admitting that it was flawed and are currently going to any lengths to avoid this. Financially, the Pacific League has benefited more from the inter-league series than the playoffs. The playoffs themselves are a smoke screen designed to hide the fact that most Pacific League teams (and this also applies to most Central League teams as well) do not have adequate marketing strategies.

- It doesn't help that the PL keeps on revising the system because the first place Hawks keep on losing in the playoffs.

That's right. And it's starting to look suspiciously like the J-League. I was enthusiastic at the beginning and then they kept messing with the formula: adding teams, merging teams, changing team names, uniforms, league structure, etc. After a while I couldn't really keep up so they lost me as a fan.

I have nothing against playoffs as such, but they've got to agree to one one system and stick to it. Whatever it is. But that's probably wishful thinking with the current crop of administrators.