It shouldn’t even need to be said.

There are 30 Major League Baseball teams. Having 14 teams make the playoffs is nearly half the league and would be bad for baseball.

On Friday, Buster Olney of ESPN reported that the players union approached MLB with an offer to reopen discussions of a 14-team postseason. He added that the union is hopeful this could lead to a breakthrough, which has obviously been hard to come by.

It’s a shame it had to come to this. The players obviously don’t want a 14-team postseason; just this recent Monday, Jon Heyman of MLB Network reported that they were resistant to it and that there was “widespread consensus” not to go to it.

It’s unclear what the exact playoff format would look like if that number was increased from 10 to 14. Looking at last year’s standings, 15 teams finished with above-.500 records. The year before, 14 teams were above .500. Essentially, the only qualifier to make the postseason would to be to post a .500 record.

Teams settling for mediocre seasons has already been a highly discussed topic, even before the lockout. Having a certain subset of teams not trying to win makes the sport less fun for everyone. There have been plenty of discussions about ways to combat this trend, and it’s certainly been part of the framework behind the recent CBA negotiations.

The Wild Card concept was already introduced to give more teams a chance. Whether that was a good implementation or not is a topic for another time, but at the very least, it hasn’t been too egregious. Until MLB was shaken by all this recent drama, the postseason structure was working pretty well. The format heavily rewarded division winners while still giving a chance to unlucky runner-ups in tougher divisions. Ten of the 30 teams made some type of postseason play, with eight making the division series.

The consensus already seemed to be that the playoff format would be going to at least 12 teams regardless. One has to imagine that the players still weren’t thrilled with this, but they’re doing everything they can to get a deal in place. It’s the owners that continue to negotiate in bad faith. They’re the ones who locked the players out, not the other way around, and even when the players have tried to make compromises, the owners still haven’t budged.

In an interesting article for The Athletic on Friday, Chad Jennings proposed a promotion/relegation system for MLB, similar to that of Premiere League soccer. While being sure to make multiple “Ted Lasso” references, Jennings laid out an intricate albeit completely hypothetical layout of what it would look like. The point of the system would be to incentivize winning.

While the reality of something like this actually coming to fruition in baseball is unlikely, it’s an interesting thing to ponder. If teams had to play under the fear of relegation, that would undoubtedly incentivize them to win as many games as possible. There would be far less tanking for high draft picks. Even the worst teams in the league would still be competing their hearts out, not just going through the motions waiting for the season to end.

One thing that isn’t going to magically incentivize teams to win is a 14-team playoff format. All it will do is lump more undeserving .500 teams in with the actually elite teams. Rewarding mediocrity is never a good thing. What’s next, 16 teams? Perhaps there will be a day when all 30 teams make the playoffs. Where does the line get drawn, and how many more useless changes is baseball going to have to undertake?