Wild card debate heightens during playoffs

By Grant Hughes

2003 marks the ninth year of Major League Baseball's controversial wild card playoff format, and the debate over its effects on the game rages on more strongly than ever. How the current system holds up under the considerable scrutiny it has recently received will shape, or reshape, the future of the national pastime.

"The wild card has all but eliminated the significance of Major League Baseball's regular season," said NBC broadcaster and author Bob Costas.

In a recent episode of ESPN's series "Outside the Lines," Costas went head to head with other significant baseball minds to defend the anti-wild card sentiments in his book, "Fair Ball: A Fan's Case for Baseball."

At the core of Costas' argument is his insistence that the wild card, by allowing one extra team per league to make the playoffs, has devalued baseball's grueling 162 game regular season schedule.

Purists like Costas are up in arms over the inclusion of teams in the playoffs that have essentially done no better than second place. Costas conceded that the wild card does foster competition and allow for more teams to remain in races further into the season, but he was quick to point out that the classic pennant races, like the Yankee vs. Red Sox rivalry, have become meaningless. With the Red Sox falling short in the American League's Eastern Division this year, yet still making the postseason, Costas clearly has a point.

Joe Buck, a proponent of the wild card and the Fox network's head play-by-play baseball broadcaster, argued in a recent Fox Sports Network interview that the Red Sox, despite "backing into the playoffs via the wild card, will still have to go through the Yankees in the American League Championship Series."

Yes, it is true that the Red Sox cannot reach the World Series without beating the Yankees. But that fact is irrelevant to baseball purists, who believe that each division's best team should be rewarded for sustained performance over baseball's six-month season.

Though not necessarily siding with the purists, ESPN's senior baseball analyst, Peter Gammons, has pointed out in his column, "Diamond Notes," that "the wild card has robbed us of any modern day Bobby Thomsons."

Even if people do not know who Bobby Thomson is, they are familiar with the phrase, "The Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant!" If the wild card had existed in 1951, Thomson's famous "shot heard round the world" against the Brooklyn Dodgers would have been inconsequential. Wrote Gammons, "if the current system had existed then, the Dodgers would still have made the playoffs as a wild card, and the Giants' miraculous comeback from 13.5 games behind would have meant nothing."

So the wild card does remove some of the significance of baseball's regular season. However, it does give more teams a shot at the postseason. What wild card teams have done with that shot has been nothing short of remarkable. In the eight World Series from 1995 to 2002, three have featured wild card teams. Twice, a wild card team has won the World Series (Florida in 1997 and Anaheim in 2002).

ESPN's Jason Stark commented in his ESPN.com column on the quality of the past nine years' wild card teams.

Noted Stark: "Despite fears when the concept was introduced that the wild card entry would be some mediocre 84-win kind of team, the fact is, the wild card is almost always a very good, if not great team. The last wild card team that failed to win 90 games was the 1996 Orioles. There have been seven division winners that didn't win 90 since then."

Steve Hirdt, a member of the Elias Sports Bureau, also agreed that the wild card does not water down postseason play.

"If you just looked at the eight teams in the playoffs and you didn't know who the wild card teams were, you wouldn't think these teams were any less qualified than anybody else," said Hirdt in an interview with Stark.

Bay Area baseball fans know all too well that wild card teams can be just as dangerous in a postseason series as any division winner. The Giants fell this year to the Florida Marlins, whose 91 wins this season did not beat out the Atlanta Braves in the NL East, but were enough to gain entry into the postseason as a wild card. At least for one five game series, the Marlins were clearly better than the Giants, who won their own division outright.

Oakland Athletics fans similarly understand the quality of wild card entries. Pitted against the Boston Red Sox, the Athletics struggled and eventually lost the American League Division Series to a Red Sox team that finished six games out of first in their own division.

So, the wild card does devalue the regular season, by not giving the teams with the best records advantage in the playoffs. But what wild card teams have shown us since 1995 is that the teams with the most regular season wins are not necessarily the best teams. A number of factors contribute to teams' success during the regular season. The unbalanced schedule, divisional imbalance and interleague play all have significant effects on a team's total number of wins. During the playoffs, these factors disappear, and records cease to be significant. Purists claim that the old system weeded out the inferior teams and left only the cream of the crop for the postseason. Since the wild card's inception, the success of wild card teams has all but debunked that theory. Until the regular season becomes a more fair, accurate determinant of a team's quality, the wild card will remain a necessity in Major League Baseball.