The postseason “begins” tonight in Major League
Baseball. You’ll notice I put begins in
quotation marks. The New York Yankees host the Houston Astros in the American
League Wild Card game. Tomorrow night the Pittsburgh Pirates host the Chicago
Cubs in the National League Wild Card game. In 2012, Major League Baseball
began using two wild cards in the postseason and having a one-game round
between the two wild cards for the right to advance to the division series.
If you ask me, this is one of the worst rules in sports. The
playoffs, as I know them in Major League Baseball, are four teams in each
league. There are three division winners and a wild card. It’s one thing to
play 162 games and finish tied with another team. Then you play a tiebreaker.
This wild card game has created a one-game playoff scenario that breaks ties
that never existed.
The New York Yankees played the entire season and finished
one game better than the Houston Astros. Before 2012, that would have had the
Yankees in the postseason and the Astros home watching. Now, you might as well
forget that the previous 162 games even happened because all that matters is
one game. The only thing the Yankees won by having a better record than the
Houston Astros was home field advantage for one game, which in baseball doesn’t
mean much.
There is a reason why in baseball, more so than other
professional sports, teams celebrate clinching playoff berths. It’s a big deal.
After all 30 teams play 162 games, if your team is one that gets to play well
into October when two-thirds of the league is sent home, it’s worth celebrating
over. But in cases like the Yankees and Pirates? Despite being the two teams
that traditionally would have been baseball’s only wild cards, now all it means
is a chance to play one extra game.
On top of that, both the Yankees and Pirates may be up
against the respective Cy Young winners in their leagues. Tonight, the Yankees
face 20-game winner Dallas Keuchel of Houston. While the AL Cy Young winner
could very well wind up being Toronto’s David Price, Keuchel had a season that
will get him recognized and shouldn’t finish behind any other pitcher besides
Price in the voting. The Pirates face baseball’s hottest pitcher in Chicago’s
Jake Arietta who seems to have the upper hand on the Los Angeles Dodgers duo of
Zack Grienke and Clayton Kershaw in the NL Cy Young race.
While proponents of the second wild card will point to the
San Francisco Giants from last year as the second wild card in the National
League to win their third World Series title in five seasons, it’s not adding
up for me. In one game in baseball, any team can beat any other team. So for a
team to fight all season to earn baseball’s first wild card only to be rewarded
with home field advantage in a one game scenario isn’t enough for me. It’s easy
for me to say just go back to the old way where there is only one wild card. I
would be fine with that.
But my scenario, which could appease both sides to this
issue, would be to play a best-of-three series in which the first wild card
hosts all three games. It would be like any other three-game series in the
regular season where all the games are played at the same location. That, to
me, would be an ample reward for the first wild card team and allow for a
second wild card. The second wild card should have to win two games on the
road, not just steal one and then get to go home and close the series out. So
Rob Manfred, in case you’re reading this, that’s my proposal. For Yankee fans
and Pirate fans, if your seasons end tonight and tomorrow night, I’m sorry.
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