The Chris Moeller Archives

What the wild card hath wrought 2009

This is an annual blog feature in which we highlight the annual wreckage caused by the wild card system in Major League Baseball. This year's edition is sponsored by the popular VHS release "Larry 'Bud' Melman Shows You How To Play Pool Like a Champion".

Some people enjoy watching 2nd place teams battle it out in the post-season after the 162-game regular season has been deemed insufficient in settling the standings, but I don't. Baseball commentators, in support of the wild card, routinely make the mathematical mistake of measuring what the wild card adds to the pennant race (i.e. keeping more teams in contention) but failing to subtract what it often robs from us (i.e. classic pennant races between 1st and 2nd place teams).

This year, again, is no exception. Not that there were many good playoff races anyway, but there were a couple. The wild card winners in each league, Boston and Colorado, won handedly, and of course, their seasons have been extended by the wild card, which baseball loves, especially (only?) in the case of the Red Sox, but there were two great divisional races that came down to the final weekend and the wild card system robbed us of one. In the American League Central Division, the Twins and Tigers are headed towards a one-game playoff on Monday, and that will be great fun for both clubs, but the National League Western Division also came down to the final weekend, and if not for the wild card, not only would the Dodgers and Rockies have been unsettled until the second to last game of the season (the Dodgers clinched last night), but they were matched up head-to-head for the final three games on the schedule. Instead of the dramatics of a head-to-head showdown between western rivals this weekend, with elimination at stake for the losing club, the Dodgers and Rockies instead had to decide whether they would each go full-tilt through Sunday for home-field advantage or simply rest up for the playoffs, and now there's only a 25% chance (in theory) that the division rivals will even face each other in October.

Only an entity like Major League Baseball would be stupid enough to have a(n ideally-sized) 16-team league (the National) and then divide that league into three divisions, instead of 2, 4, or even 8. Four would do quite nicely, of course. Then you'd have four first-place teams duking it out in October in the NL.

The American League has 14 teams, of course, which is as fucked-up a number as baseball deserves for all of its wild expansion over the years. But the Junior Circuit is a necessary evil so if they want to keep three divisions and a wild card winner over there, that's up to them. It would still be three rounds of the post-season for both the National and the American. Why does the NL have to suffer with 3 divisions?

Of course, we'll never see any sensibility of this stripe, especially in the American League, because that association contains what baseball incorrectly assumes to be its greatest financial asset-- the Yankees/Red Sox rivalry. No, it's not enough to have New York and Boston battling it out on the field all summer long, up to 20 times head-to-head. They also have to be able to go mano-y-mano in the playoffs every other year, and maybe someday, if we're lucky, in the World Series too. This rivalry is the secret real reason that the wild card exists.

You'll find Yankees and Red Sox logos and images on all Major League Baseball advertisements, post-season promos, Mastercard commercials, and even those annoying Pepsi-Cola ads this summer, in which the only important baseball figures throughout history, evidently, are former and current Yankees, Ted Williams, and Jackie Robinson. (Fuck you, Pepsi. I like Coke, anyway, and it's #1. Isn't Pepsi really just the New York Mets of the soft-drink industry?)

You only have to look as far as the National Football League to see how much this marketing strategy hurts baseball. It's not the amount of money that teams spend on players that separates franchises financially, it's how the teams are disproportionately promoted. There are jaw-dropping sales disparities between teams when only a small handful are promoted as "national teams." Sports fans in Kansas City, as just one example, believe that Major League Baseball couldn't give a bigger shit about them, and they're right. Meanwhile, Kansas Citians love their football team, and the NFL, even though the Chiefs are equally as lousy each season as the baseball Royals.

In Major League Baseball, the television networks and the corporate sponsors wag the dog, and FOX television and Pepsi want the Yankees, and they want the Red Sox. Fans of the other 28 teams are all forced to dance to that tune. So hurray for the American League wild card winners, your 2009 Boston Red Sox! It looks like they're on a collision course with the Yankees once again.

posted by CM @ 3:08 PM