The wild card games are completed. The Astros shut out the Yankees and the Cubs shut out the Pirates. The Yankees and Pirates can both affirmatively state that they made the postseason, however brief the experience. The Astros and Cubs can both state that they won a playoff game and little else. It is almost a mockery of the concept to pretend that these are playoff games. It’s akin to believing that the eight teams in the so-called first round of the NCAA basketball tournament have played tournament games. Everybody (except NCAA executives) knows that they are play-in games, not tournament games. So it is with the wild card games.
And let’s not pretend that the games prove anything, other than who get to play in the divisional series. One baseball game is the approximate equivalent of six minutes of an NFL football game. (The 16-game NFL season is one tenth of a 162-game MLB season, meaning that one NFL game equals roughly 10 MLB games, meaning that one tenth on an NFL game, six minutes, equals one MLB game.) It is a travesty to let the equivalent of six minutes of a football game decide anything. Can you imagine the uproar if the NFL added a new round of playoffs and told the teams they would play six minutes to determine which of them would advance to the next playoff game. People would laugh. But that is what the MLB does. That is the what Bud Selig’s playoff expansion has wrought.
Even the five games of the divisional series approximate only one half of a football game. I say “approximate” because not every series goes five games, some end after only three. Even five games aren’t enough to determine which team is better, just which team won three games first. And ditto a seven games series and winning four games. The original World Series concept of playing a nine game series was best. But we abandoned that over a century ago.
The easiest way to address the problem is to discard the ill-conceived system of having two wild card teams in each league. There was nothing wrong with the original wild card system which had treated baseball well since 1969. Only four teams should make the playoffs and each series should be best of seven games. To attempt to avoid paying games in cold weather, travel days should be eliminated except between series, which would also place more emphasis on depth of starting pitching, not just quality. The wild card team should be the team with the best record that doesn’t win an artificially created division (more on that in a subsequent post). To avoid the silliness of a one game playoff of two or more tied teams, MLB should create a tie-break system. Every youth baseball tournament in the country has one, so it shouldn’t be that hard to find a reasonable concept that would reward something that was earned over a 162-game period (for instance, fewest runs allowed) rather than reward the team whose (one fifth of its) starting rotation has a better day.
Still and all, congratulations to the Astros and Cubs and I wish them well as they advance. By the way, how did two National League teams win the two wild card games? Oh, right, another questionable Bud Selig decision. As with many of his decisions, this one benefited the Brewers. (More on that in a later post.)
I’m looking forward to the divisional series. May the best teams win. But if they do, it will be fortuitous, not by design.