Why baseball has become a joke

Here's vindication for my contempt for the wild card(s!) and the seemingly endless (and pointless) MLB playoff structure which have combined to so thoroughly exalt luck over skill: 1) the best team almost never wins the World Series, and 2) the better a playoff team is, the less likely it is to win it.

There is no such thing as an "upset" in baseball. On any given day, the worst team in the major leagues beating the best one isn't particularly news. It's a proverb that every team wins a third of its games and loses a third; that what separates the best team from the worse one is what they do in the remaining third.

It follows that no playoff system, no matter how extended, is as good a test as the regular season. There is a reason why there are 162 games in a baseball season and only 16 in a football season!

It used to be that the nation would come to a halt for a week every year when the team that had clearly demonstrated its superiority over the National League played a best-of-seven series against the team that had done the same over the American. Kids in cities whose teams weren't even playing hollowed out books with razor blades so they could hide transistor radios and listen to every pitch in school. Now, with a playoff system that's a month or so long and second chances given to two teams in each league that weren't even good enough to win their own divisions, it barely produces more than a national yawn.

Having ruined the post-season long since and dropped what was once the national pastime into a distant third in popularity behind the NBA and the NFL,  the logical next step for baseball would be to throw out the regular season and playoffs and pick the two teams to play in the World Series out of a hat.

We'll see whether my Cubs- who are in a position to clinch the NL Central tonight, are clearly baseball's best team, and will likely win over a hundred games- can beat the hoodoo baseball's eternal and ridiculously random postseason has put on excellence next month,