We here at the Tribune have many responsibilities. We protect the Constitution. Just ask us. We annoy Mayor Daley. Just ask him. And we try to figure new ways to get the Cubs into the playoffs.
So how about adding another wild-card team in each league this season?
What, too late? Well, don’t be surprised if it happens, and soon, though perhaps not soon enough to help Tribune stock . . . I mean the City of Chicago and Cubdom everywhere.
Baseball has run itself back into America’s heart with several innovations on Commissioner Bud Selig’s watch, such as interleague play and the expanded playoffs with wild-card teams. Some of the best games and rivalries have developed through interleague play. And there’s no better race than the National League wild-card chase. Without it, this would be a very dull season.
But another wild card in each league is needed not only to give another worthy team a chance for the postseason but also to resolve the great playoff inequity that persists.
You can be a great team for six months like the St. Louis Cardinals and then lose in the playoffs to a team that’s better prepared because of the race it has just finished. That’s one reason wild-card teams have been so successful of late, winning three of the last four World Series.
You don’t see it in the NFL, which has a first-week bye for the best teams, or the NBA, which opens with No. 1 against No. 16 or perhaps No. 15, giving its best team a breather. As for hockey, who knows how it’s done?
But baseball, in effect, punishes teams with the best record all season by effectively giving them no playoff advantage. They must advance immediately to a short series with a hot team that has come through a real race. Meanwhile, the top team–say, the Cardinals–has coasted for months.
As often as manager Tony La Russa reminds his team to maintain its edge, it’s virtually impossible to do when you’re not playing meaningful games. And it’s equally hard to turn the competitive spigot back on.
What would be more fair, and better for baseball, is another wild-card team.
The two wild-card teams in each league would meet in a best-of-three series over the first three days after the season. The winner would earn the right to face the team with the best record. By then the wild-card winner has probably used up its best pitching, and the team with the best record has had a chance to rest.
If the wild-card team then gets through to the World Series, nice going, you’ve earned it. If the team with the best record falls, well, you’ve had the easiest postseason schedule, so too bad for you.
Yes, the traditionalists will holler again. The self-appointed guardians of the game are the ones bemoaning lights and the designated hitter between messages on their BlackBerrys and snacks of sushi and mai tais at the concession stands.
Yes, the traditionalists . . . whites-only was part of major-league baseball’s tradition for more than 50 years, and the game didn’t exactly embrace the possibility of a Jew breaking Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record when Hank Greenberg hit 58 homers in 1938.
Ah, the Golden Age.
It’s a wonder Selig didn’t ban traditionalists from the ballparks with all the abuse he took over the wild card and interleague play. He’d be considered the greatest commissioner ever if writers didn’t like to say “Kenesaw” so much.
Selig seems to truly love the game and delights in making it better and keeping up with modern changes, as opposed to union leader Don Fehr and some of his player flunkies. Really, what kind of sport is it when a third of the teams have to sell off players every season to remain solvent? And the richer teams go down the stretch in those magical division races facing minor-league pitchers.
Whenever hockey returns, it will have a spending-control mechanism. Baseball will remain the only major sport without one. It just perpetuates the Yankees’ excesses and allows salaries to remain artificially high at the expense of better competition.
Yeah, yeah, don’t pay it if you don’t want to. We’ve heard that for years. How about the players acting in the best interests of the game for once instead of their own selfish interests?
Not likely, so it’s up to the commissioner to keep saving the game from the traditionalists.
Now that I’ve got stock options, a Cubs championship run would make them look a lot better. And if that sounds too much like a player’s thinking, do I really look like I’m juicing?
More playoff teams. It may be the best chance Chicago baseball ever has.
