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From the Archives
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Wild on the WildcardPurists Plan on Roasting Baseball CrankSeptember 17, 2001 I've heard it said that "Baseball Purists", whoever they are, don't like the wildcard. If a real "baseball purist" existed, he or she would love the game just for itself, not for its outcome. The Japan League fans who adore the tie game are probably the only real baseball purists. When I hear the term "baseball purist", in context it actually usually means "baseball conservative", somebody who likes the status quo just fine and who might turn the clock back a bit on some unhappy innovations. In this sense, I'm a "baseball purist" when it comes to astroturf and the rulebook strike zone and protective body armor on hitters. When it comes to post-season play, as I understand it, baseball "purists" should want baseball to be as close as possible to the old two-league, one-post-season series ways of the past as modern market rules allow. This is where I diverge from the Purist camp. What I find mystifying is the idea that the wildcard creates a competitive situation that is somehow impure. The Czar of Baseball, who describes himself as a Baseball Purist, has proposed a four-division league as part of his currently-dormant realignment scheme, partially to create more interesting schedules by creating more meaningful head to head ballgames. Another goal of this proposal is to eliminate the need for a wildcard, the alleged anathema of the fans of pure baseball. The problem is that the Czar has confused the real problem -- multiple tiers of playoffs -- with a symptom of the problem, the need for a wildcard to add an even number of post-season teams under a divisional scheme. Divisional baseball was created in 1969 largely to extend the post-season, and thus TV revenue. It did have the side-effect of occasionally having more pennant races than otherwise was the case, not because the odds of two fairly-close teams being in the same division were increased -- they are not -- but by having more "rolls of the dice". To illustrate what I mean by this point, think on the fan interest in the pennant chase among the St. Louis Brown fan base, contrasted, say, to the New York Yankees' fan base, prior to divisional play. There was no pennant chase for either of these teams most years -- the Browns because they were always bad, the Yankees because they were so dominant. The 1939 Yankees club must've been very boring to watch -- they were so extremely good, there was little in the way of competition at any point in the season. Under the "balanced" schedule more or less in use now, in which every team in the league plays an equal number of games against every other team in the league, each league is effectively a single division by strength of opposition -- just like the old days of the eight-team leagues, in fact. But, "division winners", or sub-winners, are selected for the post-season based on a geographic accident. If you're one of the four or five teams in the West, and have the fourth-best winning percentage in the league but the best amongst your rather arbitrary geographic grouping, you're a "divisional winner". If you're the second-best team in the entire league, but have the misfortune to be in the same arbitrary geographical grouping as the team with the best record in the league, you're an also-ran. Ah, until the advent of the wildcard. That's the beauty of the wildcard: it absolutely assures that the team with the second-best winning percentage in the league makes it to the post-season. And, if you think about it, the wild-card team can never, ever be any worse than the fourth-best team in the league. The same thing can't be said about division winners. Let us hearken back to the 83-79 Twins winning the 1987 World Series. They weren't even the fifth-best team in a twelve-team league. Let us ponder the 1996 Houston Astros, who were fighting with the Pirates for the division crown with a week to go -- both teams being below .500 at the time. Sure, contests for division championships add interest to the end of the season. But runaway divisional champions can also make September deadly dull. Ask any AL Central fan other than Clevelanders since 1994 (at least prior to this year, of course) how much fun they had in the pennant race. That's the second absolutely wonderful feature about the wild card: by the nature of things, there will almost always be a race for the wildcard spot. If you look at the normal distribution of winning percentages among baseball teams, the wild-card spot is almost always going to fall in the middle-steep part of the bell-curve -- where, statistically speaking, the population is going to be larger than at the top. Meaning you're more likely to have a "race" for that wildcard spot than you would be for any given division. And, the way baseball's numbers work out, this means that any team that at least hangs around .500 until September has an outside shot at the wildcard if it puts on a September spurt. This does far more to stir up widespread, late fan interest than divisional play per se. The wildcard is a meritocracy. The reason the wildcard has a bad name is the way it's used in other organized sports to completely bastardize the post-season. In hockey and basketball, a team can make it to the post-season with a less-than-.500 record, because more than half the teams make it. In football, it's almost as bad. As long as baseball keeps the number of teams in the post-season to approximately 25% or less of the total number of teams, and keeps only a single wildcard per league, it's going to be fine. The Czar's realignment plan called for four divisions in the NL (and perhaps eventually in the AL if and when it expands to 16 teams), so that there'd be an equal number of teams in each division and to allow the meaningful return of an unbalanced schedule to make winning each division more meaningful. There are of course some major problems with doing this, not the least of which is pigeonholing regional divisions around existing franchises. The real problem underlying realignment is the concept of divisional baseball. The divisions really are practical for one and only one reason, and that's to determine the start times of local TV broadcasts for away teams. This is important for teams being able to market themselves as family entertainment. But it almost guarantees that at least a couple of mediocre teams get in the post-season each year by virtue of geographical accident. And that in turn makes the odds that the post-season will provide boring games much more likely. [more] |
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[continued] My inkling is that post-season baseball ratings have declined over the years -- this despite the fact that baseball attendance is at an all-time high -- largely because so many of the contests are going to be boring, pitting very good teams against just above average teams. Three tiers of baseball play-offs is a lot to follow, especially if the divisional winners are weak and don't play well. There's no drama in a game three of yet another sweep of the Rangers by the Yankees. The Wildcard gets the blame for this, because it's the "new" thing in the mix the last few years. But it's not to blame, nor is the basic fact of 'extra' games being played. It's bad divisional teams winning, and bad playoff games, and the rather arbitrary nature of deciding which team plays which team when. I of course have a solution. Let's stay with three divisions (punting for the time being the problem of an unequal number of teams in each division, which could itself be solved by switching an NL team to the AL and having at least one interleague series going on at all times.) I accept the necessity of having an unbalanced schedule with divisions as a reality of having to schedule local TV during the season. But let's can the current playoff scheme. It's far too arbitrary when a team with a slight edge in #1 and #2 pitchers can beat a better team in a five-game series, as with the 1997 Marlins. It doesn't attract television viewers. It's often boring baseball. It's time to switch the league championship and divisional series to a single tournament. The winner of the AL tournament would meet the winner of the AL tournament in the traditional seven-game world series. The tournament itself might work something like this. Each of the teams in the post-season tournament plays every other team, two games on the road, two at home. This assures that each team will have to go at least four pitchers deep against every other team, thus making the post-season a truer test of a team's depth. And it eliminates any strange byproducts of scheduling, like not scheduling the wildcard winner against its own divisional winner. This arrangement has a great virtue over the current format, where TV schedulers have no idea if a series is three- or four-games or as many as seven: there's a set number of dates on which, barring rain, games will be played. Until a team loses six games, it'll still have a chance, thus involving as many as eight major league markets as much as an extra week into September. So even if there's not a "national" interest in the post-season, there will be stronger regional draw. And the odds that major market teams will be involved later are much, much greater than under the current format. If two teams are tied at the end of the 12-game tournament, then there's a special one-game playoff to determine the victor. Three and four-way ties are possible, but rather unlikely: you could have a rule that the wildcard qualifier "loses" in the event of a tie if you wanted to do away with these possibilities. I'd note parenthetically that if baseball switched to a post-season tournament, it wouldn't have to have an even number of teams qualifying for the post-season. It could reduce back to two divisions per league, with one wildcard, and use the round-robin format, with one team "resting" at all times. This would reduce the total number of post-season games, but perhaps would focus the viewing population on a single game at a time. There are many other solutions, but the worst of them is to eliminate the wildcard, the best pure innovation for old-fashioned competition in recent baseball history.
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| The Baseball Crank may be contacted at crank@thediamondangle.com. (c) 2001 Matthew Wall/The Baseball Crank. |
