Like Kissing Someone Else's Sister

How many times have you heard this season that the Yankees and Rays are battling for first place in the AL East. They are doing no such thing.

It doesn't make a nose hair's worth of difference whether the Yanks win the division and the Rays take the wild card or vice versa. As the team in the Bronx demonstrated a decade ago, they shake the Etch-A-Sketch after the season and start all over.

For practical purposes, one team will draw Texas and the other Minnesota. We still today don't know which team the AL East champ will play. Does it really matter? A World Series appearance requires victory in two playoff series, regardless of the opponent.

The division winner gets an extra home game, while the Wild Card squad has an added road challenge in the unlikely event that the series goes the distance. (Most series end before game seven.) It changes the odds of winning the series by about two percentage points.

That's more than a bucket of warm spit, but a whole lot less than getting your team healthy and your rotation set. In fact, if the teams are tied on the last day of the season, both managers would be well-advised (and don't worry, they both are) to sacrifice the division and send a scrub to the mound so the rotation is correctly rotated for the playoffs.

Ask the '06 Tigers, the '05 Astros, the '04 Red Sox, '03 Marlins, '02 Giants, '00 Mets and the '97 Marlins about conquering their division. Each of them leapfrogged the team that outpaced them in the regular season to reach the World Series. They know that coming in second is like kissing someone else's sister...if the Wild Card's involved.

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