The National League...
...has a cheese champion.
Another wild card team, which got hot at the right time, but wasn't good enough in the best test- the regular season- to win its own division, is going to the "World Series."
Here's rooting for another morally vacant "world championship" for baseball this year.
Comments
Dan, the reason the wildcard is different from the previous playoff system is that in the past, all the playoff teams have actually _won something_ to get there. Each participant won its division -- and did so by playing a schedule which was loaded disproportionately with teams from its own division. So if the Dodgers won 100 games, and the Mets won 90 games, there was still no real way to tell who was the better team, because the Mets may have played a tougher schedule. The playoff series under that system did not inherently undermine the regular season.
The wildcard does inherently undermine the regular season, precisely at the point when a wildcard team meets the champion of its own division in a playoff series. The Cardinals were 11 games better than Houston, playing a nearly identical schedule. The Astros beat the Cardinals 4-games-to-2 in the NLCS. That still gives the Cardinals a 9-game advantage over the Astros this year. Yet Houston goes to the Series. So what was the regular season for? Heck, the Cardinals didn't even get a bye-round in the playoffs for having the best record. All they got was 1 measly extra home game, in a sport in which home-field advantage means relatively little. And even then, the advantage doesn't become an advantage until Game 7, which never happened in this series.
That being said, I'm really not that upset over the fact that the Cardinals lost. I wasn't expecting them to win this series when it started, so it wasn't a crushing blow. But this system stinks, no matter how much phony interest it drums up among lukewarm fans of mediocre franchises in the final 2 weeks of the regular season.
Dan, you're missing the point that before divisional play- and actually even the wild card- we literally never had a team which had played the same schedule as another team, and had an inferior schedule, even being considered for advancement to the World Series.
I'm not even crazy about divisional play, though with the number of teams we have now it's probably inevitable. Still, there is no way that it's anything but a cheap circus trick that a team which played the same schedule as another team, but had an inferior record over the 162-game season, can even be considered as a contender for the "world championship" simply because it beat a team which proved itself over the long haul to be its better in a best-of-seven
series.
So long as the wild card persists, no such team which ends up winning the "World Series" will, in my eyes, be anything but a pretender to the title of
world champion.
I'll be rooting for the Astros to beat the Sox. It's just that I don't think they'll have any morally valid claim to being the world champions if they do.
When the Cubs win their first World Series since 1908- something for which I've waited all my life- I don't want it to be as the result of a gimmick.