Urban: Billy was right all along

And not to gloss over the two misfires, but .500 is as accurate as anyone familiar with baseball can expect when it comes to seeing the playoff future — particularly in the first round, when the series are in the best-of-five format.

As A’s general manager Billy Beane once famously said, the playoffs are a “crapshoot.” They’re a crapshoot in the first round, they’re a crapshoot in the best-of-seven league championship series and they’re a crapshoot in the World Series.

At the time he dropped it, Beane’s crapshoot line sounded like something of a copout, because it came after Oakland’s four consecutive division-series losses. And it was accompanied by one of the few lines I’m sure Beane regrets having said. To paraphrase, the King of Contending Against Financial Odds said, “Give me another $50 million and we’ll win one of these.”

The line about $50 million extra making a difference is regrettable because it’s since been proven way off the mark.

The New York Yankees, for instance, have been spending in the neighborhood of $200 million for the past few years, and they haven’t gotten out of the first round since 2004.

The notion that the playoffs are a crapshoot, however, rings true. And changing the first round to a seven-game set isn’t going to change that in the slightest. In fact, changing the format would be a bad idea, and here’s why:

After the long grind that is the regular season, the best-of-five format punches you in the face, bringing intensity and urgency back into the game immediately. Maybe not as much this season, because the final two weeks of the grind were sheer lunacy and it bled into an extra game that featured a stunning 13th-inning comeback from a two-run deficit.

But in most years, the bulk of the playoff participants are determined with a week or so left in the regular season, so the final days are anticlimactic as teams line up their pitching and rest their studs.

But then come the five-game series, in which every game, every inning and every pitch is a killer.

Does the better team always win a five-game set? No. And that’s kind of the point. The best team doesn’t always win a seven-game series, either.

The 162-game marathon is simply designed to weed out the pretenders.

The postseason currently has a 19-game max, and changing the first round to seven games would only bump the number to 21. Either way, it still rewards the team that survived the marathon by allowing it entry into the tournament.

But once the tournament begins, it rewards the team that plays best under the suffocating pressure in full sprint.

Two extra games wouldn’t have stopped the St. Louis Cardinals last season, and they wouldn’t have helped the Yankees this season. The hot team prevails.

Who’s the hot team right now? They’re all hot, but who knows if they’ll be hot once the long wait between series is over. That’s why it’s a crapshoot.

Oh, and I’ve got the Colorado Rockies in seven and the Boston Red Sox in six.

Mychael Urban is the author of “Aces: The Last Season On The Mound With The Oakland A’s Big Three — Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito” and a writer for MLB.com. He also hosts the weekend edition of “Sportsphone 680” on KNBR (680 AM).