The owner of the Oakland A’s, Lew Wolff, recently suggested that the first round of playoffs in professional baseball, the League Division Series, should be shortened to a single game. He said it would be, in his words, exciting.

I find this interesting for a few reasons. First, the source of the suggestion: As was noted in the book Moneyball, the problem with the Playoffs is that it undoes the thing that makes a low-budget, strategically winning team such as Oakland successful: it introduces luck. The timeline of the playoffs is excruciatingly short when compared to the marathon regular season, so luck (a random vector that only time can average out) becomes a far more potent influencer. This could be the reason that, despite having winning seasons, the A’s particular management style never finds them in the World Series.

So this makes the suggestion by Wolff to shorten it to one game all the more curious. I could understand the impetus, but this only exacerbates the problem: shortening the gameplay from 5 games to 1 increases the possibility of luck as influencer dramatically (I would say it increases it 5x, but I’ve never been good at percentages). I suppose they hope for the best on the crapshoot: put it all on black.

If Major League Baseball really wanted to shorten the postseason while limiting luck as a deciding factor in the outcome, the structure should be something like this: LDS: 7 games. LCS: 5 games, WS: 3 games. That would ensure that luck as a factor was minimized during the early rounds, when there are a greater number of teams involved, ergo a greater number of games played (the math works out to a possible 28 games in the LDS, 10 games in the LCS, and 3 games in the WS) to spread the luck over. That way, by the time we get to the World Series, luck is only strongly influencing the outcome between 2 teams, so it’s a greater chance that a “deserving” team will be crowned champion.

Now, will Selig agree to a best-of-three WS? Severely doubtful. The World Series has always been a best of 7 situation, and tradition aside, limiting it to at worst 2, at best 3 games wouldn’t exactly make for a windfall in advertising dollars. So I humbly suggest the 3-5-7 game structure. Sure, it still increases the odds of an “undeserving” team making it to the World Series, but each successive round would prove out the stronger team’s particular strengths.

Just a thought.