MLB Wild Card 2012: 5 Other Playoff Changes MLB Needs

If Bud Selig orders a cup of coffee and finds it too weak, do you think he pours water in it?

With the announcement coming today that Major League Baseball will be expanding its playoffs by adding a fifth team in each league, Selig has once again diluted the quality of his product.

Adding another team and forcing them to play a one-game playoff is not merely an imperfect solution, it erodes the foundation that playoff baseball is built on.

If the premise of the playoffs is to allow the best overall team to rise above the competition, how does introducing a “one-and-done” scenario allow that to happen?

Any statistician will tell you that the larger the sample size, the more accurate the result will be. While a seven-game series is by no means perfect, it at least gives us some indication of which team is better.

By introducing a winner-take-all game, MLB has told fans that the champion does not need to be the best team. They are saying to fans, “Thanks for sitting through that six-month, 162-game slog. It meant pretty much nothing, but at least we got paid!”

Division races will be rendered almost completely meaningless. Once a team knows its playoff position is secure, they can simply rest their players and align their pitching staff so that everyone is fresh for their one-game playoff.

All the drama from last year’s AL and NL East races would have been for naught; both the Boston Red Sox and Atlanta Braves, despite their late season collapses, would have been in as Wild Card teams.

This new system takes races that were already made less exciting by the Wild Card format and makes them even worse. While some years there will inevitably be hotly contested playoff spots, many years there will not.

Plus, if a lackluster team squeaks in, they all of a sudden have the same chance of winning it all as a 100-win team does. As fans, we must ask ourselves: Does a third place team really deserve to win the World Series?

Rather than continue this new playoff setup, MLB should consider adopting one of the following five potential systems. They range from realistic to completely impossible, but all would be an improvement over the new 10-team format.

Option 1: Return to the Old Wild Card Format

Rare is the time that people want a return to the status quo, but this instance would be one of those situations. The Wild Card format allows for a good team in a tough division to have a shot at making the playoffs.

Indeed, a Wild Card team has won five of the 17 World Series since the rule went into effect, including three in a row from 2002 to 2004.

If the MLB were to return to this format, they should at least change the Division Series to a best-of-seven games instead of best-of-five. This switch would allow teams to use their best pitchers more than once, ensuring all teams get to put their top players on the field as much as possible.

Option 2: Abolish Divisions, Top Four Teams Make It

If you like the idea that the playoffs are for the "best of the best," then this format might be more your style. Division play is fun and all, but sometimes you get years like 2008 where three of the top four teams are from one division.

In a situation like that, division play is actually counterproductive to having the best possible playoffs. The MLB should, then, do away with the divisions entirely.

They can balance the schedule to ensure everyone gets a fair shot, and at the end of the season the top four teams in each league make the playoffs.

While some may cry foul at the lack of division rivalries, let’s not forget that when you play someone 19 times a year, interest in the rivalry eventually weakens. A Cubs-Cardinals or Red Sox-Yankees game when they only see each other for two series a season would generate national attention and heighten the importance of every pitch.

Option 3: Two Divisions, LCS Only

Before the Wild Card began in 1995 (it was supposed to start in 1994, but the season was canceled), this two-team playoff system ensure that one of the best teams from each league would be in the World Series. It emphasized the importance of the regular season.

The size of the leagues has remained essentially the same since the Wild Card began, making a return to this format easy. The National League has added two teams, creating an imbalance that some would find unfair.

To alleviate this disparity, MLB could rotate teams between divisions on a yearly basis to ensure that, in the long run, each team would have had the same number of years in seven- and eight-team divisions.

Option 4: World Series Only

Realistically, the World Series is the only part of the playoffs that non-baseball fans are interested in. Everything else is just unnecessary buildup.

So why not skip straight to the finish?

MLB could expand the regular season to ensure a larger (and thus more accurate) sample size from which the AL and NL champions will emerge. The races at the end of the season will be equally as exciting as the ones we see now, if not more so, given the high stakes.

While this model does create the problem of a lot of meaningless match-ups by the 100-game mark of the season, it is hardly any different than the way things currently work.

By doing things this way, MLB keeps the historic brand of the World Series intact while drawing more attention to their product with the highly-competitive races at the end of the season.

Would it really be so bad to have another Bobby Thomson moment?

Option 5: No Playoffs, Longer Regular Season

My personal favorite and by far the least realistic, this system is modeled after the same one used in the English Premier League. If it’s been working for them since 1888, perhaps MLB should take notice.

Under this new format, the playoffs would be abolished. The schedules would be balanced but there would be no leagues or divisions, and the team with the best record at the end of the season would be crowned champion.

While it is a bit of an extreme solution, by eliminating the playoffs, the MLB ensures that the best team throughout the entire season rather than the team that got hot for a couple weeks is recognized.

As an added wrinkle that allows them to preserve the “World Series” brand, MLB could also institute a “League Cup” in the same style as the English FA Cup. With winner-take-all games played sporadically over the course of the season, it would allow for teams from Double-A and Triple-A to have a shot at taking down a Major League opponent.

A best-of-three championship called the World Series would be the culmination of this highly-exciting, interleague competition.