In Defense of A Second Wildcard

With the LCSes about to start and with Posnanski pointing out the problems with the wildcard in general, I thought I might as well revisit the idea of a second wildcard, which I remain in favor of.

The first argument against it is Pierce’s slippery slope argument. I don’t really buy it. First, because it has the potential problem with all slippery slope arguments: if Selig (God forbid) wanted NBA style playoffs, he can have them whether or not an extra game is added. More importantly — and this is the key to the pro-extra wildcard case — I think a playoff game for the wildcard is more consistent with the pre-wildcard format, because it gives a strong advantage to the division winner. So I think it’s traction on the slippery slope if anything.

An interesting argument, made by George in comments, is that a play in game gives an additional advantage to champions of weak divisions. A real drawback, for sure. But I don’t think it’s that big a deal, either. Obviously, if baseball was always configured the way the AL is this year — in which the Twins might have finished fifth in the AL East — this would be problem to really worry about. But then you have this year’s NL, where the Colorado and San Diego were teams of essentially similar quality to the wildcard Braves. My bottom line, I guess, is that as soon as you have more than one team per league get in and want pennant races (and I think that Posnanski is right that pennant races are more exciting than anything but the World Series), you’re going to get some mild inequities. This was one of the cases for the wild card — why should the ’93 Giants go home when they were probably the second-best team in baseball? My answer then was, and still is — because they lost. If you don’t win your division, I don’t think you have anything to complain about. Preserving the pennant races is, to me, more important than ensuring that the third-best rather than the fourth-best team makes it into the playoffs. The best team never has anything to worry about.

So I can understand why people don’t want to disadvantage teams like this year’s Yankees, no worse that the second-best team in the league. But the system also has a real downside — September games that should have been thrilling were a dreary farce, and rationally so because in winning the division the Rays “won” an appointment with a better team, with home field advantage that was so meaningful that the home team went 0-5 in the series. Nuts to that. The way I see it, if you finish second, you should feel lucky that you even have the opportunity of a play-in game, and if your division is tougher, too bad. Win it and you don’t have to worry. Given that any playoff system entails inequities, preserving the pennant race is the most important thing.