The Major League Baseball Players Association has agreed to a plan to expand the playoffs to 16 teams for the 2020 season, sources have told ESPN’s Marly Rivera.
A playoff expansion still needs the final approval of MLB owners, sources said.
All second-place teams in the six divisions would now qualify for the playoffs, sources said. Then the seventh and eighth teams in each league would be chosen by best record among other teams.
The first round of the playoffs in each league will be four three-game series with all games played at the higher seed’s home stadium. The rest of the rounds will be their customary length: The two Division Series in each league will be five-game series, while the AL and NL Championship Series and World Series will be seven-game series.
If a 16-team format is adopted, it would include a televised postseason-seeding show in which top-seeded teams pick their first-round opponents, a source told ESPN’s Buster Olney on Thursday.
Players will receive a $50 million pool that will be distributed after each round and could increase if fans are allowed in stadiums for the postseason.
Sources said an important aspect for the players was player and family housing and access to the stadium during the playoffs.
The change means 53% of the 30 teams reach the playoffs. If eight teams qualified for the playoffs in each league from 1995 through 2019, 46 teams at or below .500 would have made it, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, an average of just under two per season. Those teams included 25 from the AL.
There would have been only three seasons in which all playoff teams would have had winning records, Elias said: 2000, 2003 and 2009.
The only time in the past 10 seasons that eight teams in each league finished at or above .500 was in 2012, according to ESPN Stats & Information.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
