Major League Baseball will never find a playoff format that suits everybody, but a one-game wild card series is far from the best solution.
In both years of the one-game wild card era so far, two of the four teams that moved on to the division series owned a season record inferior to their opponents’.
The two-team playoff expansion was essentially Major League Baseball’s solution to teams in heavily competitive divisions, like the American League East, milking the final month of their seasons after securing either the division title or wild card slot.
In 2010, a year and a half before the expansion was announced, the Tampa Bay Rays and the New York Yankees spent September exchanging first place possession in the AL East while the third-place Red Sox trailed by at least six games all month.
As a result, both the Rays and Yankees were able to rest their starters while finishing out the month of September under .500 since they had already accounted for two of the four AL postseason berths.
Because dramatic late-season title runs guarantee higher television ratings, MLB commissioner Bud Selig gave fans in two additional markets hope and a reason to tune in.
One of MLB’s arguments for the expansion is that it emphasizes the importance of a team striving to win its division rather than settling for a one-game wild card crapshoot berth.
But instead of discouraging teams from finishing in their division as runner-up wild card winners, the next-best unqualified team is given another chance.
The Cleveland Indians played their hearts out during a 10-game winning streak to close the season that launched them into the better-of-two wild card slots. However, they couldn’t put a run across the Tampa Bay Rays and were eliminated.
It potentially strips the top wild card team of a shot at the championship and hands it off to a club that has lost six or seven more games just based on one solitary game.
Sudden-death playoff decisions work for sports like the NFL because games are always played once a week and the fundamentally superior team can almost always be counted on to come out on top.
But baseball is unique from other major sports in that it’s always played in series because pitching rotations and bench players account for a team’s depth.
Selig and MLB executives overreacted to boring baseball played in the final month of the 2010 season when there wasn’t an issue with eight playoff teams to begin with.
Selig would have benefitted more from extending the best-of-five division series by two games to match the rest of the best-of-seven playoff format, which would only help attract more viewers rather than turn more off.
Last year the 94-win Braves had a questionable infield fly-rule call go against them in last season’s wild card game, allowing the 88-win St. Louis Cardinals to make it two rounds up to the NLCS.
A 162-game season can handle a bad call here and there, but a bad call in a one-game elimination matchup can cost a proven team a season.