No Need to Get Wild
Listed in: BaseballFor some reason, I seem to have something against ESPN.com's Jerry Crasnick. What can I say, the guy has a tendency to write stupid articles. Today's gem is about the Wild Card, and how perhaps we should give teams that win it additional obstacles to winning the World Series. You can find it, in all of it's glory, here.
First off, let me start by saying something: the way that baseball crowns a champion has always been a bit odd. Teams play 162 games, then have their season narrowed down to a five- or seven-game series. If the purpose of the long regular season is to prove who the best team in baseball (or at least a given league) is, then the playoffs throw all that out the window. It was one thing before 1961, when each league winner went straight to the World Series, but even then you had years like 1960, when the Yankees were clearly the superior team but still lost to the Pirates. If you were looking for the best measure of success, you'd simply award the title to whoever had the best record at the end of the season, but we like to have championship games/series in our sports. With the two added rounds of playoff series, it becomes less and less likely that the team with the best record during the regular season wins the World Series. Because home field advantage means less in baseball than in any other sport, there are few if any advantages to having the best record.
In any case, let's return to the article. The first "reason" proposed why wild card teams have had such great success in the playoffs is that "lots of people in baseball think wild cards have an inherent advantage because they're grinding for victories until the final days of the season out of sheer necessity."
First off, it's been well-established that momentum isn't worth squat in the playoffs. But even better, Crasnick refutes this himself by pointing out that of the six wild card teams to reach the World Series, three of them entered the playoffs with records below or barely above .500 in September.
If the purpose of this article is to make me think that the Wild Card system should be tweaked, so far Jerry is doing a poor job. The next section, about why you should keep the system the same way (as the first option presented) again undermines the whole concept. Crasnick points out that no wild card team has ever won fewer than 88 games, while just last year we had the Cardinals win their division (and the World Series) with 83 wins. There have been a number of years where the Wild Card team has won more games than at least one division winner, so to say that these teams are somehow undeserving of a shot at the World Series is stupid, at least in a world of three divisions per league.
As for the other solutions posited, let's discuss them here. First, expanding the division series to seven games, while perhaps a bit fairer, isn't going to solve the basic "problem." Second of all, MLB has already let the series get spaced out ridiculously because of television, adding another two games would only make the first round drag on longer and dilute the importance of depth.
This deserves a moment of discussion. Before TV ran the show, the playoffs were similar to the regular season in that they required a certain amount of depth to compete. Now, with multiple off days per series, teams with a pair of good starters and a strong starting lineup can dominate (the 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks being the prime example) even if the rest of their team is weak. Again, the conditions for success in the playoffs have become noticeably different from the conditions for success during the regular season, which is a more correct way of explaining why wild card teams tend to do well in the playoffs.
Adding another wild card team again delays the playoffs, and one of the things I like most about baseball is that making the playoffs is still a rare achievement (at least compared to the other major professional sports). Plus, how does adding a second wild card team make it less likely that a wild card team wins the World Series (yes, they would in theory play each other before the rest of the playoffs began, but you're still going to have a 25% chance that a wild card team wins the series).
Making the wild card team play four-of-five games on the road doesn't solve much either. As mentioned above, home field advantage in baseball is negligible, and besides, some of the time the wild card team actually has a better record than the division winner they're playing (like this year's Rockies-Phillies series).
Finally, I know you always have to throw in some crackpot theory, but come on, division winners only having to win two-of-five if they won their division by more than five games? You mean that the Indians are so much better than the Yankees that they deserve a massive advantage?
Look, baseball's playoff system is far from fair, but that's an unsolvable problem unless you want to just award the championship to the team with the best record. If you really wanted to make things fair, you'd tighten up the schedule, so that there was at most one off-day during each round so that teams were forced to use their entire roster like they are in the regular season. Still, when you reduce the results of 162 games into a few short series, you shouldn't be surprised when the small sample size produces some strange results. Unless you're Jerry Crasnick, that is, in which case you can feel free to be stunned.
