Major League Baseball plans to follow its shortest regular season in 142 years with its longest postseason ever.
MLB and the MLB Players Association announced Thursday that the 2020 postseason field will expand from ten to 16 teams. Instead of a single Wild Card game in each league, the postseason would begin with eight best-of-three Wild Card series.
ESPN has acquired rights to seven of the eight series, with the lone exception on TBS. After airing only six MLB Postseason games in the past 14 years, ESPN could air as many as 21 this season — more than TBS (20) and just behind Fox Sports (22).
The Wild Card round would begin Tuesday, September 29 and run as late as Friday, October 2. By that point, the NBA and NHL would be in their championship series, should their returns go as planned.
Long before world events delayed and eventually shortened the season, Major League Baseball had been mulling an expansion of its postseason. In February, reports had MLB considering a 14-team format that would include six best-of-three Wild Card series starting in 2022.
MLB owners’ return-to-play plans included an expanded postseason field for this season, but that was seemingly shelved after talks with the union collapsed. News of the abrupt about face surfaced just a day before the season started Thursday — the deadline for any expansion.
As for the postseason format itself, the top two teams in each division would make the postseason, plus the best two remaining teams, according to multiple reports. The higher seed would host every game of the best-of-three series.
ESPN’s Buster Olney reported earlier Thursday that the top seeds would get to choose their opening round opponent in a nationally televised selection show — a change MLB has been considering since the expansion discussion started earlier this year — but that does not appear to be the case. Per MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, the matchups will be based purely on seeding.
[News from MLB.com 7.23, ESPN PR 7.23, USA Today 7.23, ESPN.com 7.23, Buster Olney/Twitter 7.23, Jon Heyman/Twitter 7.22]
