Playoffs Continue To Prove Padres Are In Wrong League

It’s tough for any eliminated team to watch the rest of the playoffs after being defeated, but it has to be especially hard for the San Diego Padres to see how the rest of the MLB playoffs are unfolding. 

Specifically, we’re talking about the American League. The Cleveland Guardians just beat the Chicago White Sox in a “playoff” seriies, and they’re about to open their series against the Tampa Bay Rays in the ALCS. 

This is baseball’s worst nightmare with the lockout fast approaching, as MLB would have vastly preferred a marquee team like the New York Yankees in the counterpoint to the Milwaukee Brewers and Los Angeles Dodgers. 

It’s one thing to have two small market teams competing in this AL series, as fans have gotten used to seeing the Milwaukee Brewers play very competitive baseball in the postseason. But very few people nationally care about the Rays or the Guardians, which is a series that’s almost impossible to market effectively. 

But this is what you get without a playoff seeding system. It’s especially bad given how bad the American League was this year, and now it’s going to get exponentially worse given that these are the only four teams available to watch. 

All of this will hopefully go by the wayside whenever the lockout gets resolved, although it’s by no means a lock given baseball’s tendency to do the worst possible thing competitively, then stick to its guns and try to justify it. Baseball continues to hang onto outdated concepts like the NL and AL in an effort to glorify its past, even though the new balanced schedule has long since eliminated any excitement about the concept of interleague play. 

For the Padres, though, they’re better than both the Guardians and the White Sox. They’re not alone in sharing this particular woe, though -- the Chicago Cubs and Atlanta Braves are basically in the same boat, just to name two teams. 

San Diego almost certainly would have beaten Cleveland or the White Sox in a playoff series, but that’s where any competitive claims the Padres have starts to fall apart. They were just beaten by the Brewers, and the Padres got pasted on the road against the Rays during the season during a stretch of games that nearly cost them a playoff berth. 

There’s plenty of work to do going forward, especially with the rotation, but this has to be salt in the wound for a tough, veteran team that played its heart out against Milwaukee and came within a few big plays of moving on to get another shot at LA.