Not wild about the wild card.

• Author: Barrett, Wayne M.
• Position: SPORTS SCENE

"THE BEST TEAM ALWAYS WINS; just look at the scoreboard" is a long held, if arguable, sports axiom. Yet, how can the best team win (a championship or, in this case, the pennant and World Series) if it is not even on the field in the first place? In other words, Major League Baseball's playoff system--specifically, the wild card--must go; a post-season restructuring is needed posthaste.

The irony is that the wild card purportedly was created to ensure that the top teams reach the post-season, yet it has failed in its mission. The seed was planted in 1993 when the San Francisco Giants won 103 games, but were nosed out for the West Division title by the Atlanta Braves (104 wins). The Philadelphia Phillies, meanwhile, captured the East Division with 97 triumphs. The Phils ultimately secured a spot in the Fall Classic by upending the Braves in the National League Championship Series. The wild card's percolation process continued when the Lords of Baseball decided to borrow from the world of sports' greatest money-makers, the National Football League, which had hit upon the idea when the NFL and AFL merged in 1970: Create three divisions but four playoff spots; each division champ, plus the second-place team with the best record, advances to the post-season. (The NFL has gone on to prove that more is less by now having its two conferences each filled with four division champs and two wild-card qualifiers, and rest assured that the misguided individuals running the national pastime soon will follow suit.)

We are not arguing here for fewer playoff teams. (True, that's what we really want, but that's a discussion for another day.) What we're proposing is that, whatever number of teams advance to the playoffs, they all should be deserving. While the baseball wild card does guarantee that the National or American League team with the circuit's second-best record cannot be left out of the post-season party, it does not--and often has not--secured the four best teams in each league for the playoffs. By "best" teams, we mean those with the best records. However, when you create multiple mini-divisions, what often happens is that, not only does the wild-card winner have a better record than one of the division champs, but so do some third- and even fourth-place clubs.

The situation reached the height of obsurdity last season when the San Diego Padres led the N.L. West Division for a large part of the season with a losing record. They ultimately finished...