We saw more evidence over the weekend that the regular season and postseason are different beasts.

The 111-win Los Angeles Dodgers and 101-win Atlanta Braves each bowed out of the playoffs, while the Cleveland Guardians and 99-win New York Yankees will play a deciding Game 5 on Tuesday.

The Philadelphia Phillies – who held off the Milwaukee Brewers by a game for the newly added third wild-card spot – knocked off two division winners: the St. Louis Cardinals and Braves. The San Diego Padres advanced by defeating a Dodgers team that outpaced them by 22 games in the regular season. On Saturday, those two Game 4s (Braves-Phillies, Dodgers-Padres) along with Cleveland's ninth-inning comeback against the Yankees and Houston's 18-inning 1-0 win over Seattle generated a lot of buzz for the game.

After the upsets, many people – at least those teams' fans and some media outlets in large markets – complained that these short-series playoff failures were unfair because they diminished the resumes built over 162-game seasons.

The series loss especially stung in Los Angeles, where the paper of record, the L.A. Times, opined: "If there ever was a case for canceling the playoffs and awarding a championship to one team because it was so clearly better than all the others, the 2022 Los Angeles Dodgers would be it."

The 2001 Mariners, who won 116 games and lost in the ALDS, seconded the motion.

But is the small-sample randomness of October a bug in the system or a desirable feature?

I argued last week that regular-season play – and overall interest in the sport – would benefit from having more meaning and incentives tied to success from April to September. But that wasn't an anti-playoff argument. That was an argument for celebrating the regular season in a new way – or really an old one, like returning pennant-winner status to the team with the most regular-season wins, as it was until 1968.