The Wild, Wild, Wild, Wild Card

Woe is us. Peter Gammons has spoken, and when he speaketh, the Lords of Baseball doth listen.

Let's stipulate that Gammons is a great reporter, respected and beloved across the sport and the media. But he has proposed such a terrifically bad idea it has got to be killed, bludgeoned to death with logic. I volunteer with the club.

Gammons, like the rest of Baseball Nation, is underwhelmed by this year's playoff races and disheartened by the way football has shoved the national pastime into the shadows. The result is a jerking of the knee that will expedite the sport's path to irrelevance, not forestall it. He suggests that baseball add yet another playoff round just for the Wild Cards.

Oy. Caramba. Yeesh. Take your pick.

Here's the fundamental misconception people have about playoff races. They think that making more teams eligible for the playoffs increases the number of playoff races. It categorically does not. The race is only around the last qualifying spot, regardless of whether two teams qualify, or 20 teams do.

The real difference is that when only the two best teams qualify, the battle is fierce and the consequences momentous. When 20 teams qualify, the contestants are feeble and the prize is simply a short postponement of their ignominy.

Take this year as an example. There's one wild card race -- in the NL, among Colorado, SF, Atlanta and Florida. Adding another wild card would do nothing in the AL, where Texas is the clear next best team, and nothing in the NL, where Colorado would be a lock and the three teams chasing them would be vying for the next spot. It's a wash.

That doesn't account for the additional downside of the extra playoff round -- putting aside the scheduling headaches involved. A team like the Red Sox, the second or third best team in the league, would be severely disadvantaged, particularly with respect to the significantly inferior Tigers/Twins.

Suppose instead, we returned to the old way -- two divisions, one playoff round per league. The Yankees-Red Sox tilt this weekend would matter (a little). Better yet, the Phillies and Cardinals would be waging holy war for the Eastern Division title, with everything at stake. The victor would be four wins from the World Series; the loser is done. What we have instead is each team, a month before season's end, arranging its playoff roster and hotel room assignments.

There is a direct and inverse relationship between the importance of the regular season and the number of teams in the playoffs. Certainly more playoff slots allows more teams to feel that they can contend, particularly in a sport like baseball where any team can take three of five against another. But when the fifth best team is given a nearly equal chance to claim the title in a handful of games over the first and second best, what was the point of the 162 contests that preceded them?

Does baseball really want to be like the NBA and NHL, where they play 80-game seasons for no apparent reason? In the NBA, 16 teams -- many of them godawful -- make the playoffs, but only four of them have any realistic hope of raising the trophy. In hockey the regular season is so utterly irrelevant that the top regular season team HAS NEVER won the Stanley Cup since they went to the 16-team format.

The Wild Card has added a degree of hope to half the teams in baseball and has detracted a little from the playoffs and World Series. We can live with the tradeoff. Adding lesser teams to the mix adds no more hope, but further cheapens the championship. Bud, this time, don't listen to Gammons.
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