The Fault in Our Wild Cards
The way this year's National League wild card pairing came about showed a glaring flaw in the system.
First, a disclaimer. I have followed the Pirates since I was 6 years old. But my feelings about what transpired would be the same if Pittsburgh received the benefit of the system.
Going into the final day of the regular season, the Bucs trailed St. Louis by one game in the NL Central. Pittsburgh already had earned the first wild card, and the Giants had clinched the second.
Thus, the Pirates still had a mathematical chance to catch the Cardinals for the division title. It would take a lot -- Pittsburgh win at Cincinnati, St. Louis loss at last-place Arizona and another Pirates victory in a tie-breaker game.
Still, it was worth it for manager Clint Hurdle to go for it Sunday. With Gerrit Cole pitching then, instead of being saved for the wild card game, the Bucs would have a chance to get into the tiebreaker. At worst, they'd still be playing the wild card contest with a couple of starters unavailable. Best case, the Pirates would skip past the one-game playoff and have a couple of days for those starters to recover before going into the Division Series against the Dodgers.
Meanwhile -- well, not even meanwhile, but hours later -- the Giants would have nothing to play for. Whatever happened Sunday, they'd be heading to play in Pittsburgh Wednesday.
San Francisco's pitchers would be well rested. Even better rested than might be expected, because they saved battle-tested 18-game-winner Madison Bumgarner and are having him start against the Pirates.
Instead of Bumgarner, Sunday's starter was a wet-behind-the-ears rookie, I think Charlton Heston. The Pirates already had lost by that time. Manager Bruce Bochy said if the Pirates had won, Tim Lincecum would have started the regular-season finale. You can believe the skipper if you like.
If I had been in the position Bochy was in, I might have started Sophia Loren. He was rightly taking advantage of the situation was in.
My point was that he shouldn't have been put in that situation.
It makes little sense to have a team lose, on the field, the right to host the wild card game, but then have that advantage blunted if not eliminated because the opponent earning the home field has a chance at something bigger.
It's a problem, but I have a couple of solutions.
1. Mandate that every game on the last day of the season start at the same time -- let's say 4 p.m. Eastern, 1 p.m. Pacific. That way, a team in the race wouldn't receive the advantage of knowing how other games ended before they even throw a pitch. This move would eliminate the minor advantage created by the earth's rotation.
Another advantage would be that in years with tight races, MLB could take that take a lot of that TV time slot away from the NFL, and the baseball rights could be marketed to any number of networks.
2. More important: If you're going to have two wild cards in each league, Don't have them play only one game!
They could play a best-of-three series during roughly the same amount of time the division champions have off before they begin the Division Series. The regular season ended Sunday. One league isn't starting its Division Series until Thursday. That's 1-2-3 days off, during which the league could play a 1-2-3-game wild card series.
That would soften the blow of one team's having to use an ace in the regular-season game while the team proven to be slightly inferior could line up its rotation however it wants. It would no longer be one sudden-death game.
If tiebreaker games are needed, they could still be played on the Monday after the season ends. That league could push its wild card series and one Division Series back a day.
But, you say, the wild cards might have to fly coast-to-coast overnight for the third game (or second, depending on whether the series format was 1-2 or 2-1). So what? That's tough. The division champs earned their time off, and it should be more difficult for the wild cards to win.
3. The third choice would be to go back to one wild card, but we'll never see that happen.
