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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 1810903, member: 289"] [I]Wild Cards and Interleague Play[/I] There was one more “new era” that began in the 1990’s. Budd Selig pushed through a plan to realign the major leagues into six divisions, with a wild card team in each league’s playoff and with it an extra level of playoffs. A few years later he added interleague play to take advantage of the game’s natural geographical rivalries. Many people delighted in these innovations. I am definitely not one of them. Baseball is a summer sport. It’s just not the same when played in uncomfortably cold weather. Football is different. You expect, if you are outside, to have to brace yourself against the elements. But a trip to the ball park is the best way to take advantage of a warm summer evening. It’s OK, if a little weird to have basketball and hockey decide their championships in June because they are played indoors. Even football normally plays its February Super Bowl indoors or in the south. Baseball needs to be decided in warm or at least no in cold weather. When there was just the World Series, that was decided in the first 10 days of October, which doesn’t present many problems. If you need one set of preliminary series, that takes us to mid-October. That’s doable but there are going to be some cold nights, particularly since the games are all played at 9PM to fit into TV schedules. When you require a third set of series before that, now you are pushing into late October and November and for any games played in the north, it’s just not baseball weather. Shivering ballplayers are not going to play at a championship level and shivering fans aren’t going to enjoy their efforts as much. The fans at home are wondering why they are still playing baseball in the middle of the football season. Baseball plays 162 games. That’s twice as many as basketball and hockey and ten times as much as football. The teams in first place at the end of a 162 game season are not there by accident. It’s not appropriate that, after 162 games, a second place team could move on to win the World Series. Of course, a second place team might be better than a team that wins a 4 or 5 team division. When the 1994 strike occurred, the Texas Rangers were leading the American League West, a four team division, with a 52-62 record. Imagine if such a team had made the playoffs, gotten ‘hot’ and won the World Series? It also has to be realized how easy it is to upset a team in baseball. So easy, the term “upset” is rarely used. A last place team can beat a first place team and it’s just another score. Baseball is a game of rotations. You have a different team depending on who is on the pitcher’s mound. And you can’t see to it that Jim Brown or Michael Jordan gets the ball on every possession. Babe Ruth batted every ninth player, just like the pticher. And he was a man trying to hit a moving round ball with a round bat. Nobody else in sport tries to do that. And you can’t physically force the other team to lose by blocking, tackling or checking them into the boards. There’s no blitz or full court press. There’s no “defense” in the sense of other sports. There’s pitching and fielding, but that’s not the same thing. That makes this sport the one in which you most have to honor the achievements of the regular season. After 162 games, you don’t want your champion to just be the team that gets hot in the playoffs. You want a champion who first proved their right to be there and then won the title against other teams who had done the same thing. . Once upon a time baseball had two 8 team leagues. There was a “first division” in each league, consisting, usually of the top 4 teams who would contend for the title and then the bottom four teams who were not good enough to do so. That was the case through 60 years that included two world wars, a depression and arrival league. Nobody went out of business. In that 60 years the team with the worst regular season record to appear in the World Series was the 1959 Dodgers, who finished the regular season 86-68, then swept a best of 3 playoff with the Braves, (set up to break a tie), to go to 88-68. Thus, for 60 years, there was never a team in the World Series that wasn’t at least 20 games over .500. That remained true until the 1973 Mets, who managed to win a 6 team division with an 82-79 record and then upset the 99-63 Reds in the NCS, then took the 94-68 Athletics to the 7th game in the World Series. I was not yet a Mets fan and recall being relieved that an 82-79 team didn’t win the World Series. The 1974 A’s won the Series after a 90-72 season. The 1981 Dodgers were 63-47, which over 162 games translates to 93-69. In 1987 the 85-77 Twins, helped by an overwhelming home field advantage, (which they got on an alternating basis, not based on their regular season record, won the World Series, by far to that point the worst ever record for a World Series champion. They actually managed to win a 7 team division with that record and went undefeated at home in the playoffs. Then, in 1995, (delayed a year by the strike),we had six divisions and a wild card. The 1997 Marlins were the first second place team to win the World Series but at least they were 92-70. The 2000 Yankees fell apart at the end of the regular season, losing 15 of their last 18 games including losses by 1-11, 4-15, 3-16, 4-15 again and consecutive games of 1-11, 2-11, 3-13 and 1-9, to finish 87-74. But they won a flat five team division and got it together in the playoffs, beating a 91-70 Athletics team, a 90-71 Mariners team that had lost a one game playoff to the A’s and a 94-68 Mets team, (that was also a second place team) in the World Series. In the old two division set-up, they would have finished second to the 90-72 Indians. In 2002 the second place Angels won the series. At least they were 99-63. But they were 4 games behind the A’s. In 2003 it was the second place Marlins at 91-71, 10 games behind the Braves. In 2004 it was a second place Red Sox team at 98-64. The Yankees beat them out by 3 games but had to beat them in the post season, as well. They could not. In 2006 The Cardinals won a flat 6 team division with a 83-78 record. In the old days, they would have finished 13 ½ games behind the Mets but the Cardinals beat them in the NLCS and then beat the 95-66, (second place) Tigers in the series. In 2011 the Cardinals finished 90-72, 6 games behind the Brewers, whom they defeated in the NLCS before winning the series from the Rangers. In 2014 the Giants and Royals played in the new wild card game- a single game- before winning the “divisional” series and the league championship series. They then played a terrific 7 game World Series between an 88-74 team and an 88-74 team, each the fourth best record in their league. In 2005, I had a debate on the old Connecticut baseball board we used to use to discuss “other sports” about the wild card and someone, either a Yankee Red Sox fan could not see why anyone would be against the system. The Yankees and Red Sox had met in classic series in both the 2003 and 2004 post seasons and he wondered “why anyone wouldn’t want to see those two go at it for 7 games”. That season the AL had scheduled the two teams for a much-anticipated four game series to end the regular season in Fenway Park. When the time came to play that series, both teams had already wrapped up the playoffs and neither cared who won the American League East. The big final series turned out to be basically Scranton vs. Pawtucket. Everyone assumed they’d be meeting in the playoffs anyway so who cared? But the Angels beat the Yankees and the White Sox beat the Red Sox and the much anticipated post season series never materialized. In fact, the Yankees and Red Sox have never met in a post season series since. What has happened is that baseball’s drama has mostly shifted from August and September, when it used to be so great that Willie Mays twice fainted in the middle of pennant races, to October. The problem is, this cedes August and September to football. People are watching “Hard Knocks” and then NFL Red Zone instead of pennant races. By the time these post season confrontations play themselves out, they are off the front of the sports page, (if there is still a sports page). Baseball needs a bridge from mid-summer, the last beachhead it still has when the attention of the nation is focused on it, to the post season and the pennant races were that bridge. They’ve eliminated that bridge by extending the playoffs. A sport wrestling with the monster football has become can’t afford to so weaken itself. Bud Selig’s other great idea was interleague play. The Yankees vs. the Mets! The Cubs vs. the White Sox! The Cardinals vs. the Royals! The Athletics vs. the Giants! The Dodgers vs. the Angels! The Astros vs. the Rangers!. Alas it also included the Yankees vs. the Marlins, the Mets vs. the Tigers, the Cubs vs. the Royals, the White Sox vs. the Reds, the Athletics vs. the Rockies, the Giants vs. the Mariners, the Dodgers vs. the Rangers, the Angels vs. the Padres and the Astros vs. the Twins, none of which anyone had been clamoring for. Even the natural rivalry games were glorified mayor’s trophy games since the teams weren’t competing for the same title. It was fun seeing the Mets play the Yankees, (especially when journeyman Dave Mlicki shut them out 6-0 in Yankee Stadium in the first ever game of the series), but it was more important for the Mets to beat the Phillies and for the Yankees to beat the Red Sox. What interleague play did was to create a scheduling nightmare and reduce the number of intra-divisional games between teams that were actually rivals for the same pennant. But I’m not the old man on the porch- not quite yet, anyway. My preference is actually more radical than anything Bud Selig came up with. And yet it’s also more traditional because it brings us back to the virtues the game once had. If I had my druthers, (and I had to go to the bathroom when they passed out the druthers), I would expand every major league sport to 32 teams and organize them into 8 geographical divisions, (which in baseball would mean getting rid of the American and National League designations). Pair up two of the divisions with each other on a rotating annual basis and have them play all their extra divisional games against each other. Then have the champions of those two 8 team divisions meet in the first round of the playoffs. The winners than play each other in the World Series/Super Bowl/Stanley Cup/NBA Finals. You’d have actual pennant races in each division where the teams would have to win their division to get a chance to play for the championship. You’d have 3-4 team races for that title. With 8 teams you’d have a team with a strong record representing each division. In the post season you’d get right down to determining the champion. Most people pay little attention until the semi- finals anyway. This way you’d go right to the semi-finals. And, since the pairing of the divisions rotates, you’d play everyone in the sport within 3 years, (except football). Now that’s a new era I’d welcome. [/QUOTE]

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