Playoffs gone 'wild'.

• Author: Barrett, Wayne M.
• Position: SPORTS SCENE - Baseball wild card

NEW SEASON, new hope; that is the time-honored mantra of spring training--except, perhaps, for the purists among us. However, the rant against instant replay overruling umpires--and all the nonsense it engenders (never has so much gone wrong in the name of "getting it right")--is a dissertation for another day. Today's lesson in March Madness will deal with the postseason playoff system. So, relax, the Grapefruit and Cactus league standings are safe for now.

With the advent of the wild card (1995) and interleague play (1997), the playing field (pardon the pun) no longer was level. Division champions sometimes had worse records than wild card teams, but still were granted home field advantage in postseason matchups. Worse still, some teams with better records than division champs did not even make the playoffs. Then there is the willy-nilly nature of interleague matchups. Kitting aside its horrendous breach of tradition--the American and National leagues only should meet in the All-Star Game and World Series--what interleague play has done is create unbalanced schedules whereby even teams within the same division are not playing the same opponents the same amount of times ... just ridiculous.

However, our New Year's resolution for 2015 is to "be real." The instant replay, interleague play, and the wild card are here to stay. So, what's the harangue about?--quite simply, the one-and-done nature of the wild card playoff game and the extra travel in the Division Series. We can fix all of that--and even make the World Series more compelling--and still "be real."

Before doing so, though, it would help to understand the mindset of major league baseball's braintrust, such as it is. Now, everyone knows that baseball had no interest in "fairness" when it went from two divisions in each circuit to three--and added the wild card. To them, more teams in more races--and an extra round of playoffs--meant more money (and understand that we have no grievance against making money; it just matters how you "earn" it).

These gold-counting moguls were not the least bit disturbed that teams with better records than division winners weren't even qualifying for the playoffs. No, what bothered them was that the wild card--except for home field advantage--was put on equal footing with division champs. Why, they wondered, should the wild card--which is the team with the best second-place record--advance straight to the best-three-out-of-five Division Series when that...