The Giants are being referred to as a Dynasty. And perhaps in this era they are. I keep going back to how baseball was played in the 60's when I first started following it. You had one team in each league, the one with the most wins goes the World Series. Only in the case of a tie after 154 or later 162 games was their a playoff. The winner from each league played the same number of games against each other. Today you have the divisions. The Angles I believe had the best record in baseball. But a lot of this came from playing in a division against the Rangers and Astros which were both very poor teams. The playoffs reward a team from a weak division and penalize a team from a strong one. What you frequently have is not the best team in the World Series judging by its overall record during the year, as in in earlier years, but frequently a team that gets hot at the end of the year. We see instances of a poor team getting red hot for a few games and beating a good one during the regular season. But these short streaks by a poor team are evened out during the course of a season. In the playoffs getting hot at the end of the year is magnified. Under the old rules probably neither the Royals or the Giants would have been in the World Series.
I understand that the playoffs, both in baseball and football, are to increase fan interest and attendance at the end of the year. Today teams are in the race for the World Series that would have been out of it under the old rules. And I understand that teams play by the rules we now have and have to compete in the playoffs. But there has always seemed to me to be something amiss for a team to play great all year and then be knocked off by a lesser team that gets red hot in the playoffs at the right time. Guess that's just how it works now.