Quick Thoughts on Baseball's New Expanded Feelings

Mixed feelings. That's the gist of it. If you haven't heard, starting this coming season, Major League Baseball will add an "extra playoff team" to each league. The team that finishes the season atop the Wild Card standings now will play the team right behind them in a "1-game series" to advance and join the three division winners.

Here's my biggest beef (hence the sarcastic quotation marks above): Don't call this an extra playoff team. Don't tell me there's an extra round of the playoffs, or a second wild card team. There are still 4 playoff spots in each league, and now the Wild Card spot will be decided by a play-in game. Let's get real: Once teams clinch a spot in that "extra playoff round", are they going to be celebrating on the field and spraying champagne in the locker room? No. If your team loses that 1-game playoff this year, are you really going to claim that your team "made the playoffs"? No. It's ridiculous.

But, if my biggest problem with the new system is the wording/marketing ploy surrounding it, I guess it can't be too awful. I like that it places more emphasis on winning the division. If you don't want to have to play in that win-or-go-home game, fine, just win your division. What I don't like is that a team who finishes ahead by 4 games in the Wild Card standings now has to win 1 more game to reach the real playoffs. They played significantly better over a 162-game span, but now they're season comes down to 1 game. Just wait until we get a game-changing blown call in one of these games. Oh, the fury.

I think I would be more accepting of the new system if we hadn't spent these last 17 years or so institutionalizing the Wild Card team as an actual playoff team. If we'd gone straight from the Just-the-Division-winners playoff system to the new play-in-game-for-the-final-playoff-spot system, it would almost seem less jarring. Instead, we spent almost 2 decades rewarding a team that finishes second with a free playoff spot. And yet, that system that's been in place has worked so well. Very tempting to question fixing it when it ain't broke. After all, look at the excitement that that system brought us on Game 162 last year. Then again, playing those two play-in games on the same day will virtually guarantee that kind of excitement every year. Circle October 5th on your calendar. It's gonna be Wild! (see what I did there?)