The round will be called the Wild Card Series. Ticket prices for each series are set by MLB, not the home teams, so they are relatively uniform across baseball. Since 2012, the playoffs for each league—American and National—consist of a one-game wild-card playoff between two wild card teams, four best-of-five Division Series (LDS) featuring the wild-card winner and the winner of each division, and finally the best-of-seven League Championship Series (LCS).
Since 2013, the Division Series restored the 2-2-1 format.

The winners of the American League Championship Series (ALCS) and the National League Championship Series (NLCS) play each other in the best-of-seven World Series.
Lose those two and L.A.'s season is over. By default, the second hosts the seventh, the third hosts the sixth & the fourth the fifth. The 16 teams (eight each from AL and NL) will face each other in a best-of-three format. There are three factors that determine the actual amount of bonus money paid to any individual player: (1) the size of the bonus pool; (2) their team's success in the season/post-season; and (3) the share of the pool assigned to the individual player.

The format will consist of eight teams from each league, seeded in the following order: division winners by record (1-3), runner-up teams by record (4-6), and the two best teams remaining (7-8). The 2002 All-Star Game had ended in a tie, much to the displeasure of both fans and sportswriters who complained about a lack of intensity and competitiveness on the part of the players. This new format doubled the postseason contenders in each league from two to four, and from four teams overall to eight.

With only 60 games on the schedule and 16 teams headed to the playoffs, the races are intense. [3], During the suspension of the 2020 MLB season due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all proposals put forward during negotiations between the MLB and Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) included a temporarily expanded postseason. MLB's expanded playoffs format for the 2020 postseason, World Series 'travel day' roundtable: Everything we learned in Games 1 and 2, Cruz, Freeman winners at Players Choice Awards, Lowe busts out with 2 HRs as Rays even Series, Dodgers keep Urias' arm fresh for Game 4 start, Padres lefty Strahm to undergo knee surgery, Nationals re-signing Harrison to one-year deal, Cash defends career-high pitch count by Glasnow, How Brandon Lowe got his swing straightened out at exactly the right time. That changed starting in 2003. This single-tiered approach persisted through 1968, even with the expansions of 1961–1962 that expanded both leagues to 10 teams. This created a new postseason round called the League Championship Series (LCS), in which the Eastern and Western division champions of each league would play a best-of-five series to determine the league champion. You have come to the Philippines Edition, for other ESPN editions, click here. To remedy this, and imitating the other major sports' long-standing playoff traditions, Major League Baseball split each league into Eastern and Western divisions, creating four divisions overall and no worse than a sixth-place finish for any team in any division until later expansions in 1977 and 1993. The format was realized on the field in 1995. MLB standings » Latest MLB Power Rankings » The first-round matchups will follow a 1-vs.-8, 2-vs.-7 format and will be best-of-three series, giving things a March Madness feel. With only 60 games on the schedule and 16 teams headed to the playoffs, the races are intense. The expanded playoff format, as it stands, is for this season only.