Quote:
Originally Posted by whoman69
I don't know what's silly about it. Baseball sees their large market teams getting beat in the playoffs by wild cards who are in smaller markets. They're also seeing the wild card team win a fair share of the time. Since 2000 there has only been three seasons where a wild card didn't make the World Series. 2002 had both teams come from the wild card. If you have teams like the Phillies and the Yankees who can outspend their competition each year to get a divsional crown, anything baseball can do to make sure those teams beat the smaller market WC helps out the networks.
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Well, first the Wild Card *SHOULD* have a tremendously harder road. Give them a shot? Sure, but they need a handicap. Same thing as the NFL, they basically have 2 play-in games instead of one, with the unfortunate drawback of forcing 2 division champs to play-in, since they have 2 wild cards.
Second, at least in the AL, this change is far more likely to screw a large market than not. Unless the AL East has their rare down year, the 1st AL Wild card often goes to the Yankees or Red Sox. Now they get yanked off from standing on the same tier as the division champs, and get told "hey, you, here's the 2nd-place AL Central team. You must beat them first in a wild high-drama do-or-die elimination game, have fun"