Most notably, in 1993, the Atlanta Braves and San Francisco Giants finished with the two best records in MLB with 104 and 103 wins, respectively.

However, since both teams played in the National League West division, the Giants missed the postseason by a single game.

[3] This assured that the team with the second-best record in its league qualified for the postseason even if it did not win its division, avoiding cases such as that of the 1993 San Francisco Giants discussed above.

[5] As mentioned above, this term had first been used for the extra round in 1981 required by the "split-season" scheduling anomaly following the midseason baseball players strike; with this playoff expansion, the Division Series became permanent.

This format was in place for the 1994 season, but that year's players' strike canceled the postseason.

With the adoption of the new collective bargaining agreement in November 2011, baseball commissioner Bud Selig announced that a new playoff system would begin within two years; the change was ultimately put into place in 2012.

The two wild-card teams played in a one-game playoff after the end of the regular season, with the winner advancing to the best-of-five Division Series.

During the suspension of the 2020 MLB season due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all proposals put forward during negotiations between MLB and the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) included a temporarily expanded postseason.

The third place division winner and the three wild card teams are each seeded from three to six in order of their regular season record.

In 1924, the World Series began using a 2-3-2 format, presumably to save on travel costs, a pattern that has continued to this day with the exception of a couple of the World War II years when wartime travel restrictions compelled a 3-4 format (used in 1943 and 1945, but not in the 1944 series, which was contested between crosstown rivals the St. Louis Browns and St. Louis Cardinals; all games were held in the same stadium in St. Louis).

From the start of the 2-3-2 format through the 2002 season, home-field advantage generally alternated between leagues each year.

Prior to the 1994 strike, the National League champion received home-field advantage in even-numbered years and the American League champion in odd-numbered years; these were reversed for 1995–2002 (because 1994 would have been the NL's turn to have home-field, but the World Series was canceled by the aforementioned strike).

The 2002 All-Star Game 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.

Following the acceptance of a new collective bargaining agreement after the 2016 season (which went into effect in 2017) home-field advantage in the World Series is no longer tied to the outcome of the All-Star Game, but instead is granted to the team with the better regular-season record.

The 2022 edition was won in six games by the eventual designated home team, the Houston Astros, making them the first such team since 2013 to actually win the deciding game of a World Series on their own home field, in this case Minute Maid Park.

This is seen as a fairer distribution of home-field advantage because previously under the 2–3 format, the team hosting the first two games had absolutely no chance of winning the series at home.

This one-year change eliminated a travel day prior to a decisive Game 5 of a Division Series and was necessary because the 2012 regular-season schedule was announced before the agreement on the new postseason was reached.

This has caused some controversy in that some people want a three-game series to determine a winner instead of an elimination game to make the playoffs more fair.

[25] The 2020 implementation of the Wild Card Series had all three games hosted at the higher seed, to reduce travel, and to reward regular season performance.

[17][15] 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.

[26] Ticket prices for each series are set by MLB, not the home teams, so they are relatively uniform across baseball.

As an example, playoff-pool full-share holders for the St. Louis Cardinals received US$362,183.97 (equivalent to $564,919 in 2024) each when the team won the World Series in 2006.