While most agree the expanded postseason made sense in a 60 game season, many do not want to see it going forward. Seeing these Wild Card series only affirms that for many.

The best of three format removes the drama of the winner-take-all Wild Card Game, and it completely fails to build the momentum you get with even a best-of-five series.

In short, we’ve learned the best-of-three format is a dud. It removes what is the typical excitement we see with postseason baseball. What it really accomplishes is giving fans who love baseball more baseball. While never a negative, it’s not accomplishing anything on the larger scale.

Learning that in and of itself is a positive. Believe it or not, there are more positives we can draw from the Wild Card round.

The first real positive we saw was holding the series in one ballpark with the top seed being the home team.

After the first year of the Wild Card format, we saw MLB switch the series to a 2-2-1 format. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this other than it not being a significant home field advantage.

When you have two division winners, it’s understood why you would use that format. However, when you have the top team in the league facing the Wild Card, it makes less sense.

Really, the biggest failing of the Wild Card format is top seeds don’t have a significant benefit to being the best team in the league. Oft times, they’re stuck playing the better team than the second best division winner. The best way to combat that is to have all five games played in the home field of the team with the best record in the league.

The other real benefit we see is playing these games closer to real baseball.

We saw teams playing three games in a row instead of having days off scattered throughout a series. With that, teams had to pay a little more attention to bullpen usage and the like. Honestly, seeing the series play out, that wasn’t much of an impact at all.

However, what we did see was baseball everyday. If you’re an Athletics or White Sox fan, you got to see your team play three days in a row. Typically, they would’ve seen their teams play two games followed by an off day followed by two more, and depending on the TV schedule, another day off or a game the following night.

At least for the Division Series, we should get five straight games. It will force teams to use more than 2-3 starters. That, in turn, really shows us just how good of a TEAM is winning the series.

Really, after 162 games, we should hope the postseason format benefits the best team. The current format doesn’t quite do that. Typically, we see teams with 1-2 top level pitchers or teams with a strong bullpen make unexpected runs.

Pushing a Division Series to five straight days would push the lesser teams to actually use their weaker fourth starter, which in turn, could very likely impact the outcome of the series.

That, in turn, could lead to better LCS and World Series matchups. Although, to be fair, MLB hasn’t been exactly suffering on the World Series matchups in recent years.

Overall, we see from these Wild Card rounds, there is a better way to handle the Division Series. We see the playing baseball everyday is a positive, and we see the best teams in the league should get complete home field advantage.

Mostly, we see best-of-three series are a dud, and they need to go away in 2021 much like the universal DH will.