Rant against the wild card

But we’re stuck with it, and since we are, we might as well actually make winning the division worth something by adding another WC team in each league, and making them play a best-of-3 series to advance to the ALDS.

It’s here to stay, we’re never going back, so you might as well save your breath.

I voted “somewhere in between.” I wouldn’t mind if there were two wild card teams, and they had to do a play-in game the day after the season ended. Then the wild card team would be handicapped somewhat. On the other hand, you can make the argument that both Boston and Texas are better than Detroit, so why should those two teams have their season on the line when Detroit has their ticket punched to the divisional round just because they play in the Central? Maybe there’s no answer.

is the way to go, preferably with a short series (2 out o 3). That way there’s more of an incentive to actually win a division and more of a punishment for the runner(s)-up to actually have to win something before they advance.

and I bet if the Yanks and Sox were flipped in the standings most of you guys would too.

I’d rather leave it as is than add more teams and rounds. Eventually the WS will end at Thanksgiving and baseball will become like the NBA and NHL – playing a 6 month regular season to eliminate 8 teams from the playoffs.

to ELIMINATE divisions all together. Just have everyone play each other approximately the same amount of times and the 4 AL teams with the best records make the playoffs, 1 playing 4 and 2 playing 3. Of course, I would never want this; it would hurt a lot of rivalries and probably make it all less interesting.

Those are the big teams, and having them both in the playoffs, preferably against one another, generates big ratings and big revenues (2003 and 2004 certainly delivered big drama).

Personally, I’m a big fan of the WC…It throws more teams in the race, which means more fan-bases are into the races for more of the season.

Moreover, is a WC winning the WS somehow less “just” than a .500 team making the playoffs in the West?

i remember the 85(?) yankees having a better record than the world champ royals, and yet we never even got a chance to play in the playoffs…that didn’t seem right

The problem is not the wild card. Consider that of the 4 major sports, the FEWEST number of teams get in to the playoffs in baseball. Of those teams, because of the division structure and payroll disparity, often the division winners themselves are weak. That is the biggest reason for the fact that divison winners have a lower representation than statistical with regard to WS wins. Every year several teams win divisions that really suck. Whys should teams in good divisions be punished, when there are often barely 500 teams making the playoffs out of bad divisions? Last year, the White Sox won the central, and they were a far worse team than the Yankees who finished 3rd in the East. This year the Red Sox are a far better team than the Tigers. Consider that the Tigers have a 8 run differential, while the Red Sox have147 (just 3 total runs behind the Yankees). You want to argue that because of geography we should peanalize these teams when the Central winners have totally sucked recently? Makes no sense at all. You also can’t do away with divisions because of travel. Instead of punishing good teams, I would advocate something going the other way-teams should be pooled and seeded as in hockey or basketball. It is not that the wild card is not punsihed enough, it is that it is punished too much.

“If it was the large disparity in payroll MLB was concerned with, it didn’t hurt medium and small market teams before 1995. Look who won the pennants: Kansas City! Can you imagine them doing anything in the modern era? Minnesota! They haven’t made it past the LCS since 1991. Milwaukee even won a pennant! How the hell did that happen? And what about Cincy, Oakland and Toronto?! (Montreal(!) had the best record in baseball at the time of the ’94 strike.)”

This statement is actually totally misguided. Why? Because payroll distribution was much more homogeneous in this time frame. Consider the fact that the top 2 payrolls in 88 were NYY and Det, in 1989 LA and NYY, in 1990 KC and NYM, and in 1991 Oak and LA. They were constantly in flux. The gap at the top was nonexistent. Teams were separated often by less than a million dollars and by about 3% or less of their total payrolls. When did that really change? It actually changed to a large degree after the 2001 season (well into the WC era). At this stage the Yankee payroll really started to dwarf other teams (it may have a long time ago as well-I don’t know the numbers). At this stage the difference between the Yankee payroll and the next closest team (this year it is the Mets) is alone more than the payroll of many many teams. This was not the case in the 80’s and 90’s at least. The total payroll spread is much much more now than it was then.

is weak sauce. Especially since the Sux are in because of it.

#2: Say what you want about Joba — but the kid is a Sox-slayer so I’ll take it. You can keep all the Javier Jose Vasquez Contreras’ you want.

1. Best record only has real relevance in the same league. When it comes to the WS, there are too many discrepencies between the leagues to say the team with the better record is, in fact, the better team.

2. The WC isn’t to blame here – very often the WC team has a better record than at least one of the 1st place winners. Look at the Dodgers last year – they were a mediocre team well behind a dozen teams that didn’t make the playoffs, but because they were in the NL West, they got play in October. OTOH, look at the 1993 Giants, who missed the playoffs despite a 100+ win season because, inexplicably, someone thought ATLANTA should be considered a West Coast team.

3. The Wild Card Format (which includes the switch to 3 divisions per league and 2 rounds of playoffs) was planned BEFORE the strike. It was NOT an attempt to to win fans back from the strike, but to stop the erosion the sport was facing in the Michael Jordan era. At the time, the NBA was threating to, or perhaps actually had, move past baseball in popularity. Since then, baseball has recovered and grown dramatically, while basketball has faded a bit. What the WC had to do with this is, of course, a matter open to debate.

4. Another aim of the WC was to keep more teams competetive late in the season, which, by and large is what has happened. This may not have boosted TV ratings (which are down for almost everything), but it has boosted attendance, and has likely helped any number of smaller market teams (Seattle, most notably).

5. If all we worry about is that the team with the best record gets the title, we may as well forgo playoffs all together, and just have the best AL and NL teams face each other like they did before 1969. Hell, we may as well just hand the trophy to whichever of those two teams had the best record and forget the games, because God forbid the underdog wins it all.

I’d go for 2 more teams in the AL (with some transfers), then split the whole thing up in four divisons a league, without a wild card. That’d be crazy…

I dunno, you could have a team again in poor ol’ Montréal, have it in the AL along with Toronto along with big spenders Boston and the Yankees in the AL… Northeast? And so forth… I just wonder how the schedule would look like under these circumstances.

Sure, smaller markets were more likely to be competitive (I mean retaining free agents and making trades to improve) in the pre-WC, reasonably priced era. Though sometimes, teams with emerging talent like the ’94 Expos, the ’03 Marlins, and the ’08 Rays can have some success. Such hope keeps smaller markets alive, which is healthy for the game/business.

The wild card has indeed “become a question of who gets hot at the right time”, just ask the 2007 Rockies… and then, look at the long layoff they had to go through waiting for the Sox.

It’s a quarter to two, please be kind! hehe