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[bryant]

Purists keep kvetching about the wild card in major league baseball. The common argument is that the wild card makes pennant races meaningless. I'm sorry, but was I somehow hallucinating when I watched the Red Sox straining to get back into the wild card hunt? Was the race between the Dodgers and the Giants somehow less interesting because it was for the wild card, not for the pennant?

In fact, the wild card increases the opportunity for meaningful races in September, because it is not limited to teams within one division. If the Yankees and the Red Sox are sparring for the pennant, there's no way the Twins can challenge either of them for that spot. If the Red Sox and the Blue Jays are going for the wild card, the A's may well be involved -- and to me that's more exciting than watching the A's sit around 10 games behind Seattle with nothing meaningful to do than play spoiler.

Sure, it didn't work out that way this year; there were no meaningful wild card chases in the last weekend of the season, and there clearly would have been a meaningful pennant race without the wild card. Let's not, however, extrapolate endlessly from one season's example.

Comments

[kirbyk.livejournal.com]

Every year, someone writes up an article on what would be happening under the old divisional alignments. It's the kind of thing writers do in September when they've got to fill space.

It seems to usually be the case that there's about the same number of close races, just different ones. We'd have had some great Braves/Diamondbacks/Giants races in the old NL West recently, and the A's/Mariners rivalry would have been exciting two out of the last three years. Instead, we got great wild-card races between the Dodgers/Giants/Astros and Anaheim/Seattle/Boston. Really, seems like 6 of one, half a dozen of another to me.

Some people argue that it's more exciting to see a pennant race between two 95+ win teams than two 85+ win teams. I just don't see it, though. When it's my team, and they've got a chance, I care.

The only serious complaint I can understand is with adding the additional round of playoffs. The MLB playoff system has always been very intense and filled only with elite teams. And going from 4 teams to 8 drops each team's chances roughly in half. (Which ought to be bad if you're a Yankee fan, but alas, they're putting up really statistically unlikely postseason numbers.) Even given this argument, though, I find that the playoffs still have plenty of intensity, and that we aren't letting bad teams slip in. I don't want to see another round and more wildcards, but it's not in practice a bad setup.

Another factor to consider is that baseball, more than almost any other sport, is full of fans that fancy themselves 'traditionalists'. They take pride in hating anything that's changed from Babe Ruth's day, like the DH, five man pitching rotations, and divisional play. Hey, if that's how they get their enjoyment, fine by me, but I don't mind some of the recent developments. It's still a great sport, with or without a DH, with or without wildcards, whether players are wearing body armor or no helmets at all.

(And go A's!)