Major MLB Moves

Alliteration aside, there are some crazy changes coming to Major League Baseball.

ESPN.com is reporting that the Houston Astros will be moving to the AL, two more wildcard spots will be added to the playoffs, and interleague play will be extended, all within the next two years. This is all coming on the heels of the sale of the Astros being finalized, and is going to make baseball look lot different, but not necessarily better.

The Houston Astros will be moving to the AL. This one actually makes sense. What doesn't make sense is why one more team hadn't been in the American League for all this team. I never understood why the AL had 14 teams to the NL's 16. It really didn't work out well for interleague play, during which two NL teams would still be playing a regular game. It was just weird. Now, theoretically, the MLB can schedule 15 interleague matchups at a time. Presumably, the Astros will join the currently-four member AL West, and that will be a good division for them, potentially creating a rivalry between them and the Rangers (if the Astros can improve a lot, obviously) in the future.

Fast forward really quickly to the third thing I mentioned, the extension of interleague play. This is the only real negative aspect of the Astros moving to the AL: it forces the MLB's hand in having interleague play throughout the season. An odd number of teams in each league (15) won't work for having all the games be AL-AL and NL-NL. Still, this is a small and necessary evil. More interleague play will not effect the outcome of the season for teams. Baseball will still be a sport in which if you are winning more than your division opponents, you will beat them to the postseason.

The second move doesn't make as much sense to me. One more wildcard spot will be added to each side of the playoffs, giving us 10 total teams to make the playoffs. While the idea of adding more teams to the playoffs is exciting to me, thinking about creating a fair playoff system for five teams on one side of the bracket makes my head hurt. Evidently, it made the MLB bigwigs' heads hurt as well, because supposedly the most likely playoff scenario is to have the two teams from each league that do not win their division (the two wildcard teams) play a one-game, winner-take-all playoff, and then the rest of the playoffs looking like they do now. Basically, its the same as the NCAA's former "Opening Round game" between the 64 and 65-seeds of the tournament.

Unfortunately, baseball is the worst game imaginable to have one game decide so much, and the reason for that is simple: in every other sport, everyone a coach expects to play in a playoff series would play in game one. In baseball, that is not the case. In baseball, the most important player on the field on a given day is the pitcher, and only one of them can play at a time. A one-game playoff would not prove anything about which team was better. And this is different than deciding which team will make it to the playoffs when two teams finish with the same record at the end of the season. In the new format, both teams would have been deemed playoff teams; in the old one, neither of them were. In the old format, it was considered a regular season game; in the new one, its a postseason game. And to let so much ride on which team has a better ace, or which pitchers is feeling better that particular day, or which infielder makes an error on that particular day, is ludicrous. To make matters worse, the team that won the series would be at a significant disadvantage heading into their divisional round matchup. Presumably, they would have started their ace in the play-in game, and then would not be able to start him twice in a five-game divisional series. It would effectively be a penalty game for "being good enough to make the playoffs, but not good enough to win your division."

"We believe after a lot of study and a lot of thought that the addition of two wildcards will really help us in the long run," was what commish Bud Selig had to say of the move. And while the thought of Selig thinking for a long time about anything makes me nervous, I agree with him in this case. Just not if he's going to make a joke out of bringing those extra two teams in by screwing them and the other wildcard teams over.