Two Wildcards? Too Many

Apparently, the vast conspiracy that determines what national baseball writers should pontificate about has finally tired of steroids, and has moved on to the pressing issue of whether or not there should be two wildcards in each league. Tom Verducci, Buster Olney, and Jayson Stark have all penned articles on this topic.

I normally ignore the musings of that type of baseball writer, but sometimes it's harder to do that for any number of reasons. It might be that the moral outrage is completely off the scales (as with a typical steroids column) or that the idea is unbelievably stupid (as with the calls for Bud Selig to whitewash events from a game so that Armando Galarraga could be a trivia answer). In this case, not only do I consider the idea stupid, but it would seriously dampen my own enthusiasm for the playoffs.

The folly of wasting one's time on this sort of thing is that just because Jayson Stark advocates something doesn't mean it has a snowball's chance in hell of coming to fruition, and I don't think this proposal is any different. However, in the course of responding I have some potentially interesting data for you on the records of playoff teams in the wildcard era.

In the 32-league seasons since the wildcard was implemented (1995-2010), the average W% for the best team in the league is .620. The second-best division winner averages .583, the third-best .556. The wildcard team is .573 on average, while the team that would be the second wildcard averages .548.

Ten times (31%) the wildcard has had the second-best record in the league, better than every team except the one that bested it for the division title. It has happened 6 times in the AL and 4 in the NL. You might expect that this happens disproportionately when an AL East team wins the wildcard, benefiting the Yankees or Red Sox. That is in fact the case. The wildcard has come out of the AL East twelve times, and in five of those seasons (42%) has had the second-best record in the league. That still leaves five seasons out of 20 (20%) in which the wildcard was not an AL East team and had the league's second-best record.

Only eight times has the wildcard had the worst record of the playoff participants (25%), twice in the AL and six times in the NL. This has become the usual circumstance in the NL, as the wildcard has not bested the #3 division winner since 2004. The opposite holds in the AL, where it has not happened since 1999, when West champ Texas edged out wildcard Boston by one game. In fact, the only other time it happened in the AL was in 1996, when West champ Texas had a better record than wildcard Baltimore.

Of course, these W% comparisons don't account for the strength of the team's schedules, which can be significant in the era of the unbalanced schedule. That would involve some more extensive computations, and I'm not sure it would significantly change the results. I have no doubt that the AL East was easily the strongest division in baseball in 2010, and yet it still managed to produce the wildcard and the team that would have been the second wildcard.

Once one accepts that wildcards are going to be part of the playoff format, I don't think it makes a lot of sense to construct additional barriers to them winning, which is what the second wildcard proposal would do. And while its proponents claim that it would emphasize winning the division, they seem to gloss over the fact that it would inevitably at some point allow a third-place team to qualify for the playoffs? Of course, you could limit the second to wildcard to only second-place teams, but that would further reduce the expected W% of that team and increase dependence on the division format.

And why exactly is winning the division important anyway? Does it really make sense to put more emphasis winning divisions when they consist of uneven numbers of teams and when they are often not even close to being competitively balanced (see the 2009-2010 NL Central)? Why should a future team in the mold of the 2010 Rays have to jump through hoops just because they happen to be a member of the same arbitrary five team grouping as New York? It's bad enough that teams in the West only have to defeat three opponents.

It seems to me as if a lot of the proponents of this plan have really never accepted the expanded playoffs. They yearn for the days in which there were only two divisions, and the possibility existed for two teams with great records to slug it out and one to be shut out. Of course, the reality is that this was less common than some would have you believe (how convenient that the classic ATL/SF race of 1993 happened in the last year of the old format and thus is frozen in time), but they have a point. There is something to be said for using the regular season and not a five-game series to cull the field down to four teams, or even two. I would have no objections with a return to that format.

However, if the expanded playoffs are non-negotiable, then any attempt to punish a wildcard team with an outstanding record only serves to further de-emphasize regular season success in every regard other than defeating the teams in one's own division, while simultaneously giving an opportunity to the other teams that have failed in their divisional races. It does emphasize winning a division, but that division is itself a far cry from the six or seven team groupings that existed in the would-be golden age. And in doing so, it does nothing to emphasize regular season success for teams that are fortunate enough to be grouped with three-five weak teams (hello, 2010 Rangers). The two best teams in baseball slug it out while mediocrities lope comfortably home? Sorry, I don't think that's excitement or upholding tradition--I think it's farcical.