September, and baseball is designed to head toward a pulsating climax where every game, every inning, every pitch could decide a season’s fate.
Yet what did we have last September? The Yankees doing everything but tank in the AL East, knowing they could slide into the wild card and beat up Minnesota again, leaving Tampa Bay to “win” by drawing another division champion from Texas – who knocked the Rays out.
Yes, the Rangers ended up winning the American League pennant, but just the fact that a division title carried no substantial reward may have stuck with Bud Selig and the MLB powers-that-be.
Word has leaked out that Selig wants the playoffs to go from eight to 10 teams in 2012. That means an extra wild card, and the two non-division winners will play off to see who joins the main fray. It may be a single game. It may be two-out-of-three.
As with everything baseball, the debates are going full-blast. Some decry a further dilution of the playoff product – too many teams get in already. Others applaud Selig for recognizing a flaw in the system and working to address it.
My reaction has come in two parts. At first, there were some exhaled groans about baseball, which once just went straight to the World Series, edging closer to NFL-NBA-NHL territory with a plan to get one-third of its teams into the playoffs.
But then I started reading some of the game’s better sages, and a different view emerged.
Only since 1995 have we possessed the six-division structure and eight-team post-season. And what’s become clear is that wild-card teams are good enough to win it all – the Marlins twice, Angels in 2002 and Red Sox in 2004.
So just having the wild card was a good move. Yes, purists will point out that 100-win teams got shut out in the past (think the 1993 Giants), but it is, without question, a fairer system.
On the other hand, the unintentional byproduct of this advancement was the fact that a division championship, hard-earned over 162 games and six months, meant close to nothing. All it gave you was an extra home game – if a playoff series got that far.
Make it a 10-team format, and suddenly you have to win a division in order to earn a bye and a few days of much-needed rest. Division leaders, if in a tight race with a wild-card entry, will have to use their best pitchers to avoid the possibility of falling to second.
And here’s where it really can get fun. A best-of-three wild-card round would give division champs too much rest and no real advantage, either. So why not make it a one-game deal?
Think about it. Baseball has lamented the attention given in September to early-season football, college and pro alike. All that would change, quickly, if we knew that, a day or two after the regular season ended, two wild cards would have their seasons on the line.
There have not been too many decisive games in the baseball post-season in recent years, and no Game 7 in the World Series since 2002. A 10-team playoff with a one-game wild-card classic would guarantee two win-or-else scenarios every season.
Perhaps the best post-season games of the last four years have come in situations like this. There was the 2007 Rockies-Padres epic, with Colorado going 14 innings just to get into the playoffs, fueling a run to the Fall Classic. And there was the 2009 Twins-Tigers classic in the Metrodome, again going to extra innings before Minnesota pulled it out.
Had they taken place in the middle of a series, diehards would remember it, but few others. However, the fact that an entire season hinged on a single game made for better theater.
Sure, it’s contrived. But so is any post-season format at the end of a long regular season in any sport, where a single result can confirm, or refute, all that has taken place before.
Not too long ago, the wisdom over adding three measly teams to the NCAA basketball tournament was severely questioned. Then Virginia Commonwealth, who would have missed a 65-team field, got all the way to the Final Four.
Now Major League Baseball has that chance to create a season-long buzz and to make the phrase “September to remember” more than just a clich that rhymes. We’ve already heard some union qualms about a longer season, but why would they oppose a chance to get more players into the post-season?
Bud Selig has been criticized or blamed for everything but the weather. But he wasn’t wrong about expanding the playoffs – and he isn’t wrong here, either. More is better, if done wisely.
