I was against it when Commissioner Bud Selig finally pushed through his proposal to add a wild-card team to the playoffs in each league in 1994. Since then, I have concluded that the wild card is not such a bad thing. It has created an extra round, often an exciting one, in postseason play and has kept fans in more cities more interested in September, and the commissioner should be credited for that.
But a residue of the addition of the wild card is that there are few pennant races being talked about in September. The buzz in the last few days of the season generally surrounds which team is going to finish second in a division, and the only races for first place anymore come in the worst divisions, which aren’t going to have a wild-card entrant.
And now baseball wants to add another wild-card team in each league? Sure, that means only 10 teams — or 33 percent of the clubs — will be in the playoffs, which still is the lowest percentage in the four major sports. But if there are few pennant races now, there will be virtually none if there are two wild cards in each league.
Baseball always had it over the other sports when it came to the term “pennant race,” because in most of the other sports, it really didn’t matter who finished first. Perhaps now that it’s been so long since there’s been a really memorable race, it doesn’t matter much anymore.
Some would say the last one of any consequence in the National League came in 1993, when the Atlanta Braves won 104 games to edge the second-place San Francisco Giants, who won 103, to win the Western Division title. That was the last season before the wild card was instituted along with three divisions in each league (the 1994 strike delayed the playoff implementation by one year).
It seems to me that 90 wins ought to be a benchmark for a playoff team in baseball. Since 1995, only four National League teams have won that many or more games and not made the playoffs.
Cincinnati lost a wild-card playoff in 1999 after winning 96. San Francisco, which would have been a second wild-card team in 2001, won 90; the Giants won 91 games but missed the playoffs again in 2004. San Diego won 90 games and finished out of the playoffs last year.
Under the proposed system, it’s possible you could find wild-card teams entering the playoffs with, say, 88 wins or worse. And that shouldn’t be good enough.
NEWS ITEM: The Chicago White Sox, touted in some circles, had the worst record in baseball (11-21) entering the weekend.
HUMMEL’S TAKE: After 17 losses in their last 23 games — they scored three runs or fewer in 16 of those games — the White Sox surely must rank as the most disappointing team so far. Even manager Ozzie Guillen, rarely at a loss for words, seems to be struggling in that realm. He told Chicago reporters after a recent loss, “There are only so many days I can tell the fans we’ll be OK. There are so many days I can tell myself we’ll be OK. I don’t know if we will be OK. Every day you say, ‘We’ll be OK, tomorrow we’ll get them.’ All of a sudden the next day is a little bit worse.”
NEWS ITEM: The Angels’ Jared Weaver finally suffered his first loss after seven wins when the Red Sox beat him Monday.
HUMMEL’S TAKE: That left four starters, all in the American League, with the best record in baseball at 5-0. One of them is Parkway Central and Missouri product Max Scherzer, who will bid for his sixth win for the Detroit Tigers on Monday at Toronto. Scherzer is coming off an eight-inning, no-run, nine-strikeout effort against the New York Yankees. He is 16-7 since last May 14, and in 16 of his last 21 starts, he has allowed three or fewer earned runs. The Cardinals drafted Scherzer out of high school in the 43rd round in 2003, but he didn’t sign. Arizona took him first in 2006 but ultimately traded him.