Screwing With the Schedule (For No Apparent Reason)

Ladies and gentlemen, it's official.  Baseball made the misguided move that was as inevitable as it was unnecessary.  Starting this season, there will be two wild card teams in each league.  They "fixed" a playoff system that wasn't broken.  And completely screwed up the schedule in the process!

Were there some things about baseball's playoff system that needed some tweaking?  Yes.  But minor tweaks and a complete overhaul are vastly different things.  And they could've made those minor tweaks without creating a significant distruption to the schedule.  Remember in 2007, when they moved the World Series from a Saturday start to a Wednesday start?  In order to move the World Series, they added extra off days into the postseason, as if the teams would be unaffected by having as many off days during the most important month of the season as they had in the previous six months!  The Rockies had to sit around for a week after winning the NL pennant that season, completely screwing up the momentum they'd built down the stretch.  They were promptly swept by the Red Sox.  It took them four years, but they finally figured out a way to have a Wednesday start to the World Series without all those unnecessary October off days.  That lasted a whopping one season.  Now it's screwed up again.

And the reason why it's screwed up now is completely different than it was five years ago.  Now they have the opposite problem.  They didn't have enough October off days to make this change this season.  As a result, there are so many potential scheduling nightmares that it seems virtually impossible for this thing to go off without a hitch.  For starters, Game 5 of the ALDS between the No. 1 seed and the wild card is scheduled for the day before the ALCS starts.  So the winner of the other series could be sitting around watching that game waiting to see where its game the next day will be.  And if there's a tie for a division title, you've got teams playing a playoff game on Thursday, with one of them then playing in the wild card game the next day.  And of course, we have the return of the wonderful 2-3 Division Series format, in which the team with homefield advantage won't actually play at home until Game 3.

Again, there are some valid concerns that were addressed with the addition of the second wild card team.  A lot of baseball people were saying that there was no added incentive to win your division if you knew you were going to the playoffs anyway (like the 2010 Yankees, who actually wanted to be the wild card so they could play the Twins instead of the Rangers).  They've also made it harder to ride one dominant starter to an upset in a short series, making it so that the "better" team would be the one that advanced.  Perhaps most significantly, they made it so that the No. 1 seed automatically plays the wild card, even if they're from the same division.  No more Yankees-Red Sox in the ALCS.  For everybody else, that's not a bad thing.

But I think they rushed into this new format.  The Astros are switching leagues next season.  One of the reasons for that was to even out the leagues at 15 teams each and the divisions at five teams each.  If they were so intent on adding another wild card team, doing it next year when you've already got this other major change taking place would've made much more sense.  Besides, next year's schedule isn't made yet.  It would've been a lot easier for them to figure out how to alter the postseason schedule without disrupting the regular season when they still had to make a regular season schedule, too.  I've even got an idea how to do it:

• Regular season starts on a Sunday night, with most teams starting on Monday (like it should), and ends on a Sunday
• Monday is reserved for any tiebreaker games
• Wild card games on Tuesday and Wednesday
• The Division Series runs Thursday-Wednesday in one league and Friday-Thursday in the other
• One LCS is Saturday-Sunday, the other is Sunday-Monday
• The World Series still starts on Wednesday

Now again, I don't think this change was at all necessary, nor do I think it's a good idea.  This isn't the NBA.  Baseball doesn't reward mediocrity.  After 162 games in six months, the four best teams in each league should be pretty clear.  What if you get a 97-win wild card team that just happens to have the misfortune of being in the same division as a team that won 102 games, and they lose a one-game playoff to the ace of an 88-74 team?  Are you seriously going to tell me that the 88-win team deserves a playoff spot over the 97-win team?  Better yet, how long until you get a third-place team winning the World Series?  I'm sure the purists will love it when that happens.

In theory, this most directly helps the Rays, Blue Jays and Orioles.  But it also makes it virtually impossible for a year to go by without both the Yankees and Red Sox in the playoffs, so does it really?  You're also increasing the number of teams that are "in contention" in September, which, I guess, is a good thing, but you're also opening the door for a lot of mediocre teams to think they're in contention when they really aren't.  And who's to say this will make the division/wild card races any better anyway?

While I don't doubt it was well-intentioned, I don't think there was any need to increase baseball's playoffs.  Twenty years ago when they added the wild card, it was needed.  Too many good teams were being left out of the postseason.  The number of wild card teams that went on to win the World Series helped to prove that point.  But do they need a second wild card team?  No.  Name one team that missed the playoffs in the wild card era that was good enough to win the World Series.  Can't do it, can you?  Exactly.