04/23/24
October 19, 2002
No, Virginia, the Wild Card doesn't suck.: Jayson Stark argues that the Wild Card has not diluted the quality of MLB postseason play, despite the insistence by the traditionalists that a Wild Card would result in, among other things, some team getting into the postseason with an 85-77 record and winning it all. (Never mind that the 1987 Twins did precisely that....) Stark also gives an interesting suggestion on how to improve the Wild Card....
I just re-read Stark's article, and I'm hard-pressed to find any ad hominem attacks on traditionalists, except for his crack about "complainers who still talk about the 1967 pennant race". That's it. (And my use of the word "traditionalist" hardly qualifies as an ad hominem attack; it's a perfectly good descriptor for someone who holds a certain set of beliefs about the game. While I disagree with "strict" traditionalism, I don't think that traditionalist positions should be ignored as such. Bob Costas, for example, makes a lot of fine points on a traditionalist basis.) And besides, there are "wild-cards" (or "seeds") in every other major sport, so why is it beyond the pale for such a thing to occur in baseball? I've never understood this. Under the old system, the NL West champion might have dominated their season series against the NL East champion -- and yet still have lost the NLCS. That's really no different than what happens in the wild-card scenario. Playoff series are always "statistically insignificant", no matter how the participants are decided. I have yet to see a convincing argument as to why the Florida Marlins winning the World Series in 1997 was such a bad thing, but the Phillies (97 wins) beating the Braves (104 wins) in 1993 was not. Of course, I don't have a problem with interleague play and I'm not particularly bothered by the DH, so....
posted by Jaquandor at 02:05 PM on October 19, 2002
The #1 argument against the wild-card is that a team (Arizona, Oakland) that beats another team (San Fran, Anaheim) over a 162-game haul shouldn't have to beat them again in a rather insignificant, statistically speaking, seven game series. Except that Arizona lost the season series to both San Francisco and Los Angeles. True, this isn't usually the case, but with teams like Arizona and New York able to spend a season beating up on lightweights like Colorado and Tampa Bay, that they have conclusively defeated their competitive rivals during regular season play is far from given. Also, the wild card is responsible for removing the Yankees from playoff contention. Therefore, it must be good.
posted by kjh at 04:59 PM on October 19, 2002
The #1 argument against the wild-card is that a team (Arizona, Oakland) that beats another team (San Fran, Anaheim) over a 162-game haul shouldn't have to beat them again in a rather insignificant, statistically speaking, seven game series. So why even have playoffs? Why not just have each team play each other an arbitrary amount of times, and let the team with the best record at the end of the season be champs. Kind of like Under-12 rec soccer. I love the wildcards, in all of the sports. For one, it give us an underdog to root for (which I do about 85% of the time, unless it's one of the handfull of teams that I root against). Take the other extreme and look at the MLS. All but two of the teams make the playoffs. And it adds a certain excitement to the end of the season that the rest of the year just doesn't have. A crescendo to it all. Everyone agrees that the playoffs are the best time of year for most any sport. It's all about the do-or-die. May as well use them to garner as much interest for the sport as possible, from a PR standpoint, right? (since pro sports are run more like businesses than teams anyways these days). Also, the wild card is responsible for removing the Yankees from playoff contention. Therefore, it must be good. Amen, brother.
posted by Ufez Jones at 01:59 AM on October 20, 2002
The #1 argument against the wild-card is that a team (Arizona, Oakland) that beats another team (San Fran, Anaheim) over a 162-game haul shouldn't have to beat them again in a rather insignificant, statistically speaking, seven game series. I and the rest of Seattle, then, are eagerly awaiting our belated World Series Championship parade from 2001. Granted, it is silly to presume the Yankees were "better" that year because they won in a 7-game series. However fans in baseball must take their lumps and recognize that the drama of the post-season is rooted in the fact that the 162 games before hand no longer count for anything but pride- it's just a test run to determine the October combatants. For every incredible rare 110+ win team like the Mariners that has a legitimate beef over having their team wasted battling a 5 game series before going to the ALCS (a bitter pill to swallow), there are countless teams winning 90-95 games to the league leader's 95-100 that could who will eventually win it all. And that unpredictability is what keeps the hopes of the fans alive. I know I recall in the first year of the playoffs how unbelievably exciting the 1995 "Refuse to Lose" Mariners were in that September pennant run and unforgettable 5 game series against the Yankees were for the whole city. Such a run never happens if it's still just June-September of the near-$200 million dollars Yankees beating up on teams. Such a run never happens if nearly half the teams in the majors still believe by August 1st they are one hot run, one good trade, from making the playoffs. That's good for baseball, and for baseball fans- when everyone has hope with the occasional payoff of a playoff berth, it's a win-win situation. When just the Yankees win, people like me just hate them all the more. What kills me about arguments against the wild card are the "sure, 100 win teams might not get in under the old format, but the wild card could mean an 80 win team would win!" line- which is all but mathematically impossible, actually; and as Stark notes, a less-than-90-win division winner is not exactly a rarity either. It's quite simple, really: the wild card is not the 2nd place team in each division; it's the team with the 2nd best record out of all the 2nd place teams- which is quite possibly a better record than two of three division winners (such as the 2001 A's or the 2002 Angels!!). The AL West has been a brutal division in the past few years, compared to the AL East where it's the Yankees, the Red Sox, and 3 teams that don't matter; the wild card rectifies the problem that the teams in the AL West (include the much maligned Rangers, who didn't do too bad considering they had two playoff teams and team with 300 wins in 3 years to face nearly 60 games out of the schedule) are spending 162 games beating up on each other while the Yankees and even the Twins (or Indians, for most recent years) get to cruise playing teams that never even had a chance. Mathematically, the wild card is really about one thing: it's the simplest way to ensure that the two best records in each league advance to the playoffs; no non-wild card format or pure ranking system can do this, including the previous method in MLB.
posted by hincandenza at 09:47 AM on October 21, 2002
"Traditionalists," like myself are easy to beat on the debating table when we are called names and our arguments are misrepresented. The #1 argument against the wild-card is that a team (Arizona, Oakland) that beats another team (San Fran, Anaheim) over a 162-game haul shouldn't have to beat them again in a rather insignificant, statistically speaking, seven game series. The other arguments -- a weakened/unimportant playoff race, that 80-win teams that didn't win a pennnant can win the World Series, and that interleague play plagues the system -- these are all supporting factors. Stark's argument is as simple as this one: "Egoists who think they can better the game while turning a deaf-ear to a proven system insist that without a Wild Card, 100-win teams won't make the playoffs. In that case, why not just give the top eight teams, regardless of league, a berth?" You can tear that apart as an ad hominem attack and a rather poor strawman. Stark's is more of the same.