It’s that time of year again when Major League Baseball is staging its playoffs that culminate in the World Series. I watched a couple of games last night and was reminded that viewing sports on television can be linguistically irritating.

What set me off was the use of “postseason” to describe the present events of the baseball year. Nearly every professional sport now seems to have a tournament after the regular season, which is used to determine an overall champion. We used to hear of “post-season” play, meaning, of course, games or matches that take place after the regular season. Sportscasters are prone to finding abbreviated ways of saying anything, however, and it did not take long for the descriptive “post-season” to morph into the noun “postseason.” I am sympathetic to the impulse behind this development, but I really don’t like this usage, even thought it is said to have originated toward the end of the nineteenth century.¹

The prefix “post” means after. It is combined with either nouns or adjectives to produce adjectives or, rarely, nouns. For example, prefixing “post” to an adjective, we get such words as “postmodern” and “postoperative.” If the base word is a noun, we get new nouns such as “postmodernism” and “postimpressionism.” Rarely, do we get an adjective such as “postwar.” Also rarely, do we get a word such as “postproduction,” which can be a noun or adjective. Sports commentators would argue—should argue if they thought deeply about such things—that “postseason” is akin to “postproduction” not to “postwar,” that is, a word that can be an adjective or a standalone noun.

 Rather than speaking of the “postseason,” why do we not use a term like “playoff season” or “championship season,” each of which is more descriptive? More succinctly, we could speak of “playoffs”or “championships.” Here is a more radical idea: The World Series used to be a contest between two teams, the winners of their respective leagues. Postseason play has gotten progressively longer and more complex, what Wikipedia calls an “elimination tournament.” It consists of various components with their own names—“National League Champion Series,” for example—all leading up to that two-team showdown. We could, in fact, call the whole tournament the World Series. No doubt, this proposal is too radical for a tradition-bound game. (Though we now have universal designated hitters!)

What bothers me about the use of “postseason” is that it is treated as its own season, not simply something following the regular season. We now have preseason play, regular play, and postseason play. Curiously, no one seems to talk about the “preseason,” which instead is called spring training. Notice that postmodernism is not a different modernism but something different entirely. Likewise, “postproduction,” an adjective or a noun, refers to something after production but not something which itself is referred to as “production“ in the trade because it is quite different. Yet, the postseason is a kind of season. As best as I can tell, this grammatical quirk is unique. When I hear the way “postseason” is used, it always sounds to me as though it must involve posts!

 Ironically, with the expansion of the baseball playoffs, postseason games seem increasingly as though they do comprise a kind of season, though it is a short one relative to the 162-game regular season. By contrast, the Stanley Cup playoffs seem to go on for so long that the regular NHL season could be described as the “pre-Stanley-Cup-playoff season.” But I digress.

Overall, I prefer simply talking about the baseball “playoffs,” a term already in use that has one fewer syllable than “postseason.” Whatever one calls the current play, no posts are involved.

I want to end this essay with a baseball-related complaint unconnected to the forgoing. Lately, the baseball terms “fly out“ and “ground out” are being renders\ed as “flyout” and “groundout.” By all rules of English pronunciation, these neologisms should not be sounded like their two-word predecessors.  ( I object to “fundraise” for the same reason.)

— LED, 10/6/2007, rev. 1/28/2023

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¹I have rewritten what follows to avoid seeming too dogmatic (or simply wrong). The case I previously made against “postseason” was not as strong as I thought.