One of baseball commissioner Bud Selig’s pet peeves has been the notion that baseball is some kind of dinosaur when it comes to change.
He has proudly pointed to the introduction of the wild card in 1995 and other changes in the game during his tenure as proof that the game is not frozen in its traditions.
Of course, the timetable for drastic change in baseball is hardly blinding. The game had a simple pennant race set up for each league for 100 years until 1969, and then operated under divisional champions squaring off in a playoff for 26 years until the wild card was used.
But change is coming quicker. Selig says he expects two more wild card teams to be added to baseball’s postseason, perhaps as early as 2012. That would be a 17-year span since the first wild cards were added.
The glaciers that are the institutions in baseball are slowly shrinking. Must be global warming.
Traditionalists may be outraged as the prospect of adding more playoff teams — particularly since those teams will likely compete in almost a sudden-death-like competition to move on.
But those were the same fears raised at the idea of having wild card teams in baseball, and the addition of those two teams appears to have only increased interest in the game, not diminished it.
There will likely be no best-of-seven series in this new layer of playoffs. Selig has made it clear he does not want the postseason to stretch into November, as it did last year. That was the reason for this season starting at the end of March.
The reasonable way to deal with this would be to reduce the regular season from 162 games back to the old 154-game format that existed before the American League increased the schedule in 1961 and the National League followed the next year.
But the owners are not going to give up any home dates and the revenue that those games generate, period. Save for the NFL, every major sports league is criticized for too many regular season games, but no league has reduced its schedule and there are no plans to do so. So that is not going to happen.
That means the two new teams in baseball, expanding the postseason to 10 team, will likely face off in a best-of-three wild card series in each league, though some have suggested it could even be a one-and-done game.
Opponents say such a short series would not be fair to the teams that played an entire regular season to get there, only to be eliminated in such a short, arbitrary manner. But these are wild card teams, not division winners. Do you really want to preserve the integrity of a wild card winning season?
The new shortened layer of baseball playoffs would actually put more value on winning the division championship. A step forward that actually embraces the past, when finishing second didn’t result in the same reward.
Examiner columnist Thom Loverro is the co-host of “The Sports Fix” from noon to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday on ESPN980 and espn980.com. Contact him at [email protected].
