Time to dump the Wild Card?

I'd be willing to take that. Heck I'd even be willing to keep the DH and Wildcard if it gets rid of interleague play. That was a great idea at first that has now just become a nuisance.

 

Hey, I'd be fine with that, too. It's good enough for most leagues in most sports around the world. Six months of baseball is more than enough time to determine the best team.

But from a more pragmatic standpoint, in 1968 there were 20 teams, and two made the postseason (10 percent). The addition of the four teams in 1969 coincided with the four-team playoff format (16.7 percent make postseason). The subsequent expansion to Seattle and Toronto eight years later brought the total to 26 (15.4 percent), and the Denver/Miami expansion made it 28 (14.2 percent). So when they went to the wild card format in 1994, teams still had a better chance of making the postseason than they did in "the old days," but it remained an extremely difficult task.

The wild card and three-division format threw everything out of whack. Now eight teams out of 28 made it (28.6 percent). And the Arizona/Tampa expansion only reduced that percentage to 26.7. (Note to Zeke12: The NFL's percentage of postseason teams is 18.8, so MLB is NOT the most exclusive U.S. league.)

Going back to four-team playoffs would mean that 13.3 percent of the teams would qualify for the postseason. That seems like a historically fair percentage to me.

 

Personally, I kind of like seeing the Yanks and Red Sox face one another in the playoffs. Hard to argue that it would be more interesting to see them battle (while not even playing one another) in the final days of the regular season. The same would be true if the Cubs and Cards could ever make the playoffs at the same time or Giants and Dodgers.

 

As much as everyone celebrated 1967 in the AL and 1951 in the NL, those years were the exception to the rule in the pre-Division days. Most pennant races were settled well before the last weekend of the season, rendering thousands of games over the years as meaningless. Almost every year since 1995 has seen at least one team enter the final weekend series without having clinched a playoff spot. I'll take that over the once-in-two decades races of the so-called golden age.

 

Sounds like a living in the past percentage to me. A past very few are fond of returning to.

 

I have no problem with the wild card, but I do think it should be much harder for wild cards to reach the World Series. In the NFL for instance, wild card teams don't get a home game. I'd like to see the baseball playoffs tweaked so that the odds were similarly stacked against the wild cards -- maybe give them only one home game in a series. As it is now, wildcards go into the playoffs on roughly equal footing with the division winners, and that shouldn't be. If there were a big difference between being a division champ and being a wildcard, these last Yankee-Red Sox games would have more meaning.

 

Well, I'll change my opinion then so it conforms with what's popular. I'll also go buy some Crocs and download the new James Blunt album. Thanks for setting me straight.

 

12/32=37.5 percent, not 18.8. I'm guessing you forgot there are two conferences.

 

Would this idea work? Dump the wild card and the team with the best record in its league gets HFA & a bye in the first round while the other two have a best-of-five series. Keeps the postseason going for the ratings-hungry marketing bastards, but it also should ante up the intensity in the races.

 

But there are only 30 teams -- 16 in the National, 14 in the American.

 

The wild card and the DH . . . two items that make MLB look like a bunch of buffoons.