Ed Coleman posts his thoughts on the Wild Card: WFAN – The Fan – A Wild Thought
The real solution is the Bob Costas Solution which he wrote about in his book, oh, 10 years ago.
Add a second WC team in each league.
The two wild cards play a ONE GAME playoff on the Monday. Boo-hoo about the travel. Play better. You had 162 games to win the division, you should have tried harder.
The one game do or die forces you to use your ace to stay alive.
Then, after you’ve won the one gamer, on the Tuesday you get to travel to the city of the #1 seed and you play again. You are tired, you wasted your ace, and you are on the road. Too bad, you should have played better during the 162 games.
This solution also eliminates teams from coasting once they clinch a WC under the present scenario…you’d try darn hard to avoid a one game do or die.
Costas gets ripped but he’s dead-on about such things. In the book he also suggested moving the Astros to the AL so each league would have 15 teams (and Texas would have fewer TV-unfriendly start times on the road)…and also thought it was odd that all the great home run hitters of the 20th century decided to play between 1995 and whenever the book came out.
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Is it just me or wouldn't it be impossible to have odd numbers of teams in each league? There would be no way to schedule in-league games for all teams without there being an interleague series each day of the season. Am I missing something?
Correct, there would need to be an interleague series all the time. So what? Does it really matter that it is "Interleague week!" or that the schedule is fair.
I like the proposal that Jayson Stark made on the ESPN site a couple of weeks ago about scheduling. He suggest that baseball should have something closer to NFL style scheduling. You play a home and home series against every team in your league, but you play larger numbers of games against teams that had similar places in the standings at the end of the preceding season.
Yes, it would leave you with more games between teams that finished in the bottoms of their respective divisions, but it would make it a lot easier for a team that's actually rebuilding to improve their record the year after a bad season. Imagine how much easier a time the Mets would have improving after a season like 2009 if this year's finish meant that in 2010 they'd play most of their games against the worst teams of 2009.
As it is, baseball not only doesn't have a balanced schedule, but teams within divisions have such different schedules from each other that you can't make the argument that this would ruin schedule parity. (After all, the Mets get 6 games against the Yankees every year, and the Dodgers get 6 games against the Angels every year, even if their division mates get zero games against those opponents.)
As for the post-season, you won't be able to add playoff games unless the TV ratings for the games already being played improve…
No argument from me. I'd take it.