Since baseball expanded its playoff system in 1995 -- doubling the number of teams allowed to participate -- it is time for all of us to overhaul our thinking on the meaning of success. While it would appear that more playoff spots increase the chances of success, the truth is, they actually increase the chance for failure.

Ever since eight teams began making the playoffs every year, we have seen many teams go down to defeat in preliminary rounds, creating the perception that they are chokers, underachievers, slackers, cursed or worse. The fact of the matter is this: only one team can achieve ultimate glory and, even if championships were assigned on a rotating basis, your favorite team would only win once every 30 years.

	Are Greg Maddux and the Braves "chokers" every year just because they don't win it all?

Fact: It requires a lot more work to win the World Series than it did 10 years ago.

Fact: It requires even more work to win the World Series than it did 35 years ago.

Because of its expanded playoff format, baseball is going to have more and more teams like hockey's St. Louis Blues, who have made the pathetically promiscuous Stanley Cup tournament 23 straight years without winning it all. In fact, "the St. Louis Blues" is a great name for the syndrome of making the playoffs every year without winning it all. Oddly, we hold a special kind of contempt for teams like these who have what it takes to audition but who don't get the role. There is something about the human psyche that it offers more scorn for a team that makes the postseason and does not win than for a team that does not qualify at all.

We are going to have to get used to the fact that many, many talented people are never going to win the World Series and it does not make them "losers." Since the expansion of the playoffs, the following teams have won 25 playoff series between them and have but one World Series title to show for it: Cleveland, Seattle, Atlanta, St. Louis and Baltimore.

Ask yourself how you view the recent legacy of those teams and it is probably not favorably. There is a second group of teams that have made the playoffs at least three times each during the same period and have yet to win a single series: Texas (0-3), Oakland (0-3) and Houston (0-4). Our perception of them is probably even worse, yet Oakland and Houston are considered to be two of the best organizations in baseball in terms of finding and developing talent. What if Houston just missed the playoffs in those years instead of making them and going a humiliating 2-12 in the process, what would our perception of them be? Probably fairly neutral. Instead, they are viewed as a team that cannot get it done when it counts.

Making things more difficult for everyone involved is the presence in this time period of a dynasty hogging all the rings. Putting aside the Yankees' advantage in television revenue, what they did in the 1996-2000 period is pretty remarkable, considering the gauntlet a team must now run to win the World Series. Since the team with the best record rarely wins the World Series in receny years (the '98 Yankees being the lone exception since 1990), one might argue that the Yankees were not always facing the best possible opponent in the World Series -- unlike in years past.

Let's go off on a tangent for a moment and ask: Is this actually the case? Let's compare this most recent Yankee dynasty with one that won the same number of championships (four): the DiMaggio/Gehrig Yanks of the 1936-39 period. Without checking, my gut instinct tells me that in the World Series, the modern-day Yankees would have faced opponents of much lesser quality. Being greatly biased against the wild card, three-division format, I would assume that the Joe McCarthy Yanks would have faced much tougher opponents than did the Torre version. Actually, by some remarkable cosmic coincidence, both groups of four opponents were a combined 134 games over .500. Naturally, because of the shorter schedule, this means the earlier group had a better winning percentage -- but not a remarkably better one:

1936-39 opponents: .609 (373-239)
1996-00 opponents: .603 (391-257)

But to get to those nearly equal opponents, the Yankees had to run a gauntlet their predecessors did not. True, the records of the teams they played in the playoffs were not especially impressive on the whole, totaling a .561 winning percentage. Three of the eight didn't get to 90 wins and none of them even achieved the semi-lofty goal of .600. The two best both came in 1999 in the guise of the Rangers and Red Sox with 95 and 94 wins respectively. But, we know what can happen in a short series and the latter-day Yankees have to be commended for not allowing that to happen on their way to four World Championships, regardless of the aggregate quality of their early-round opponents.

The playoffs did work to their advantage in one way: in two of the four years, they had the luxury of seeing the top National League team knocked off by teams with lesser records. Here are year-by-year winning percentages of their respective World Series opponents. The number in parentheses is that of the best team in the National League, eliminated from contention before getting to the Yanks:

1939: .630 (Reds)
1937: .625 (Giants)
1936: .597 (Giants)
1938: .586 (Cubs)

1999: .636 (Braves)
1998: .605 (Padres; Braves were .654)
1996: .593 (Braves)
2000: .580 (Mets; Giants were .599)

The Braves of 1998 won 106 games and didn't make it out of the NLCS (denying us the chance to see teams with 220 combined victories in the World Series -- which would have been the highest total ever and the seventh-best combined winning percentage) and the 2000 Giants were waylaid by the Mets, the team with the third-best record in the league (but one still seven games better than the Yankees of that season). Had either one of them gotten through, the aggregate difference in opponents' winning percentage would have been even closer, even swinging in favor of the modern Yanks if the '98 Braves had been their World Series opponent.

Getting back to my original point, the baseball landscape is going to be increasingly littered with teams who get to the mountain but not the mountaintop. We must learn to accept that this is the way of the brave, new world created for us by the dilution of the playoffs. In this new world, we are going to have be more frugal with our use of the phrase "he couldn't win the big one," because -- owing to the simple force of numbers -- very few can ever hope to.

Jim Baker writes Monday through Friday for ESPN Insider. He can be reached at jimbakerespn@yahoo.com.