Joe Sheehan: Additional wild cards won't solve problems; they'll compound them

Instead of addressing the real issues with the current wild-card system, Bud Selig and MLB are electing to double down.

AP

Back in October 2010, in the wake of a Yankees/Rays "race" for the AL East title that both teams treated with little care, the idea of a second wild-card slot in each league was floated. After a CBA negotiation and lots of waiting, Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports reported Wednesday that the plan will be put in place for the upcoming season. An additional wild-card team will be added to each league, and the two wild cards will play a single game to advance to the Division Series. At the time of the original idea, this is what I wrote in my newsletter. Nothing has changed.

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Maybe the Padres had their run a few years too early. In the wake of the Yankees/Rays non-race in the AL East, in which both teams made it perfectly clear that the division title meant little versus getting ready for the postseason, there's a movement afoot to implement a rule change that would force teams in similar positions to value the division title more than it was valued this year. The most popular of these involves allowing a second wild-card team from each league, and having the two wild-card teams meet in a very short playoff, either one game or a best-of-three, to advance.

I called this idea "unimaginably stupid" on Twitter, and trust me, I was underselling its problems. The idea is to make winning a division more valuable than winning the wild card, so much so that a team will have to try to win its division. What it effectively does, though, is make winning a bad division valuable. To use the 2010 AL season as an example, the Twins and the Rangers, both inferior to the Yankees and Rays, would have been free to rest their regulars and set their rotations, because their divisions couldn't produce a viable challenger. Meanwhile, the Rays and Yankees would be fighting for a division title to stay out of the Coin Flip Game. Despite being objectively better teams -- both of them -- they would both be disadvantaged relative to worse teams. A system that metes out punishment and reward in inverse proportion to quality is a bad system.

Let's play it out, though. The Yankees and Rays bust their humps all month, win a few extra games, maybe 99 for the Rays, 98 for the Yankees. With a "second wild card" to play for, the Red Sox make a couple of small additions, pick up some wins in September and get to 91. One of those extra wins comes at the expense of the White Sox, who fade a bit faster, enabling the Red Sox to lock up their spot in the Coin Flip Game heading into their last series of the year.

Now, the No. 3 seed and the No. 4 seed are preparing for the playoffs, while the two best teams in the league are playing for the right to not be dropped into this unimaginably stupid Coin Flip Game against a team that, because the sixth-best team in the league is far enough behind the fifth-best, is itself resting! Moreover, after proving itself to be eight or so games better than than its divisional partner over a full season of play, the second-place team is now, after losing its run at the division title, forced to beat that inferior team one more time despite being disadvantaged in the run-up to the game.

The second-best team in baseball could go from fighting for a division title and the best record in its league to a one-game playoff against a team it was miles ahead of for six months. It may sound far-fetched, but it is not that far removed from what we would have had this year had the rule been in place. It's pretty much what you would have gotten in the AL in 2005, where the Yankees and Red Sox tied for first place while the "second wild card" would have been the Indians, five games clear of the A's for the #5 seed.

This is a really bad idea. It's one thing to throw away September because you're looking for easy cash on the heels of being tagged for $280 million in CBA violations. It's another to set up a system that has the ability to turn your regular season results into a bad joke because you didn't listen the first time. The scenario that people want to avoid, the September we just watched? It happens when two great teams play in one division together. If you force one of them into a Coin Flip Game, you will always be invalidating a great six-month season in a single afternoon, which is no way -- no way at all -- to run a sports league. The Coin Flip Game isn't "making the playoffs" any more than the play-in game in the NCAA's is "making the tournament." No one confuses Tuesday in Dayton with Friday in Charlotte, and no one will confuse Monday afternoon at Suncoast Dome on MLB Network with Wednesday night at Yankee Stadium on TBS.

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Joe Sheehan: Additional wild cards won't solve problems; they'll compound them