One more wild card team will qualify for the playoffs and the two next-best teams will play each other in a winner-take-all game for a chance to take on the division winners.
On the surface, it seems like a thoughtful and intelligent move to shift the balance of power away from teams like the Red Sox and Yankees who seemingly contend every single year. However, a closer look reveals a worse sin the playoff system makes — failing to make the regular season count.
The baseball season is long. It is arduous. It is, quite simply, a grind. But it's also an enormous sample size to judge a team by and measure their worth. You can't fluke your way into a 100-win season in Major League Baseball. If you deserve to lose 90 games, you probably will.
In small bursts, baseball is unpredictable. That's why a pitcher like Kenny Rogers has thrown a perfect game, and Pedro Martinez has not. Players can get lucky for a little while — a bloop hit can fall in, a ball can take a bad hop, an unusual run here or there can turn the tide in a game.
But over the course of six grueling months, the wheat separates from the chaff. Teams show they're deserving of the playoffs, or they don't. Adding an extra wild card will only muddy the waters and leave the door open for a team's first 162 games to quickly go to waste.
If Bud Selig and Co. wanted to do playoff expansion right, they wouldn't go with a one-game playoff. Anything can happen over the course of nine innings, with the potential for very little of it to reflect the previous 1,458.
Last year will be remembered for a frantic postseason race, culminating in a dramatic final day of the regular season. That may very well never happen again.
If the new rules were in place last season, things would have looked a lot differently. The Red Sox, Rays, Braves and Phillies would have locked up wild card berths days before. Those fateful final games would have been for nothing more than seeding. Goodbye, late-season drama.
What's worse, there's rarely two teams competing so closely for the right to gain a bonus berth to the playoffs. In the last 10 years, the team in second place in the American League wild card race has lost by two games or less only three times, including 2011.
That means that 70 percent of the time, one team has already proven itself worthy of the postseason by a pretty decent margin over their nearest competitor. Yet, they're now going to be faced with the task of re-proving over the course of four hours what they have already shown for the last six months.
Selig wants to give more teams a chance to make the playoffs. Fine. That's good for those teams and good for the game of baseball.
Doing it with a one-game playoff, however, does a disservice to the teams that have already proven themselves better during the first 162.
