I’m Not Wild About the Wild Card

By Eric Gouldsberry, This Great Game—Posted September 21, 2024

When I was a kid, I played in the American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO). Chances are, so did you. AYSO prided itself on the slogan, “Everyone Plays”—the idea being that every player gets a chance to be on the field, not stuck on the bench because of their inferior talent. 

Major League Baseball seems to have taken AYSO’s approach to heart in regards to its postseason. With 12 teams involved—half of them wild cards, second- and even third-place teams with regular season records barely better than .500—it feels like Everyone Plays in October. One-hundred-win titans find themselves in the mix against lower-tiered opponents after reigning supreme over 162 games, and are forced to prove themselves all over. Everyone starts at 0-0 again. Everyone plays. And because of that, you get World Series matchups like the Texas-Arizona pairing of 2023, featuring two wild card teams with the seventh and 13th best records during the regular season. 

If I want to see a great World Series, I ideally want to see the two best teams from the regular season. Not the two who just happen to be the best in October. And certainly not two teams that didn’t even finish first in their divisions. 

But that’s the way it’s become. Everyone Plays. In AYSO, they do it to satisfy the kids and their parents. In MLB, they do it to satisfy their bank account. 

There was a time when baseball’s postseason was pure, when it consisted of the very best teams—and no one else. 

As late as the 1960s, even as expansionism took root and the National and American Leagues each grew to 10 teams, the playoffs consisted of one series—the World Series—played by two well-deserving teams who earned the right to continue into October by winning more games than anyone else over a 162-game regular season schedule. It was a totally rational notion, based on merit. 

When further expansion increased each league’s number of teams to 12 in 1969, Major League Baseball added two new slots to the postseason mix, thanks to the splitting of each league into two divisions. To many, an expanded playoff palette in an expanded league made sense, since it still consisted of first-place teams. Runners-up need not apply. 

Nobody complained. Well, almost nobody. There were the old-school puritans who decried the occasional freak existence of an undeserving team like the 1973 New York Mets—who somehow finished first in a badly underperforming NL East with an 82-79 record, slipped into the playoffs and stunned the heavily-favored, juggernaut Cincinnati Reds in the National League Championship Series. How did the Mets do that? Simple. They just happened to be the best team that week. And, nearly, the next; they took the dynastic Oakland A’s to a seventh game of the World Series before finally succumbing. 

The four-team playoff format was maintained for 25 years, even as two more rounds of expansion increased MLB membership to 28 teams by 1993. In that year, the value of the regular season was made abundantly clear when two NL West teams—the Atlanta Braves and San Francisco Giants—entered the final day of the season with identical 103-58 records. The Braves won their last game. The Giants did not. There was no reward for second place; you either finished first and made the playoffs, or you booked a tee time with your teammates and commiserated over what might have been. As a Giants fan, I was okay with that. The better team moved on. 

I do want to go back to one word from that previous paragraph: Value. Through 1993, there was value in the regular season, of surviving a grueling, nonstop 162-game schedule in the quest to finish first. It could be argued that the pennant race’s stretch run was, in itself, a form of playoffs—with every team, including the cellar dwellers, cast as participants. Just because a team was miles behind in the standings didn’t mean it lacked a say in who advanced to October. Let’s recall the 1934 Brooklyn Dodgers, who reveled in knocking the archrival New York Giants out of first place on the season’s final day and making Giants manager Bill Terry eat his preseason taunt of the eventual fifth-place Dodgers when he blurted, “Brooklyn? Are they still in the league?” Or the 1982 Giants, who extracted last-day revenge and knocked the Dodgers out of the postseason on a late-inning, go-ahead homer by Joe Morgan that many San Francisco fans fondly recall as one of the franchise’s most memorable moments. 

In 1994, MLB went from two divisions per league to three, thus raising the number of first-place teams. But it went a step further, introducing the wild card—a concept established by the National Football League in 1970 in which the best second-place team was given extended life in the postseason. It made sense for the NFL, given the much smaller number of regular season games (14) they played. But baseball’s 162-game schedule is a test, a survival of the fittest and best; the idea of a wild card team being given a ‘second chance’ seemed alien for a sport that had embraced the regular season with a stratum of sanctity. Only one major league owner voted against the wild card in 1994, and that was future President George W. Bush of the Texas Rangers. “History will prove me right,” he said at the time. 

Bush had surrogate support from opinion makers on the outside—most notably broadcaster Bob Costas, who wrote in a guest article for The Sporting News in 1997: “Suppose that two teams, each bound for 100 wins, are in the same division. At the All-Star break, they are pulling away from the league but are running neck-and-neck for their division lead. Will someone please explain to me how this can possibly be a pennant race? Whoever is second is the wild card. There is no meaning. There is no urgency. There is no tension. There is no drama.” 

In the first 27 years of wild card participation, eight second-place teams have won the World Series, starting with the 1997 Florida Marlins. Another eight wild cards reached the Fall Classic, only to lose—though three of those lost to another wild card team in a dubious battle of runners-up. Critics fumed, but MLB bloomed in delight; they added a second wild card per league in 2012, then a third by 2022. Saying thank you very much in that latter year was the Philadelphia Phillies, who finished a distant third in the NL East behind two 100-win ballclubs, yet qualified for the postseason—winning the first three rounds of an expanded playoff format to take the National League pennant, before bowing in the World Series to Houston. A new normal had been reached: A third-place team nearly won it all, not because they were the best team in the regular season, but because they were the best in October. 

That the Phillies—or the Arizona Diamondbacks, another #6 seed who finished 84-78 and won the NL pennant a year later—were even allowed the opportunity just doesn’t feel right. 

It’s also doesn’t feel right for others who now understand, by and large, that history has proven George W. Bush right. And Costas; the regular season no longer has any meaning, urgency, tension or drama. MLB has become NHL-ified, expanding its postseason palette so much that it’s no longer about finishing first—it’s about playing well enough to “get into the dance” and then hope for the best in October. 

The embarrassment of undeserving playoff teams getting hot when they shouldn’t even be participating was laid full-frontal bare in the 2023 postseason. The three best teams, by the record—the Braves, Baltimore Orioles and Los Angeles Dodgers, each of whom won 100 or more games—were all knocked out in their first round of play by teams who won 10-15 fewer games during the regular sked. Even commissioner Rob Manfred—who had actually lobbied for 14 playoff teams during bargaining negotiations before the players’ union dialed him back to 12—couldn’t help but publicly wince at what his playoff expansionism had wrought. “It’s only Year Two,” he told reporters about the upside-down results of the 12-team format. 

There never should have been a Year One. 

In the wake of the 2023 playoffs, theories started swirling about how to better provide advantage to the first-place guys. Getting rid of the week-long bye that sometimes ice a top seed was one thought, but that doesn’t work in a six-team bracket where three teams advance; somebody’s got to take an unwanted break at some point. The comeback to that might be, “Okay then, just add two more teams.” Oh, great; let’s throw even more mediocrity into the mix. 

Another idea floating around was to have the higher seed be the home team for every game of the second round, like they do in the shorter, best-of-three first-round series: But sorry, that’s not going to stop a runaway freight train like the 2023 Arizona Diamondbacks from blowing through and sweeping away a prohibitive favorite, like they did with the Dodgers in the NL Division Series. If a team’s hot, it’s hot; what it did during the previous six months is no longer relevant. 

I rag on the Diamondbacks because they finished 84-78 during the regular season—hardly playoff material, in my opinion. But there was also the Miami Marlins, who finished with the same record and also qualified for the postseason despite being dead last in the NL in scoring. Everyone plays. 

It can get worse. The abundant assemblage of playoff teams increases the odds that—gulp—a sub-.500 team could qualify for October ball. Had the 12-team playoff format began back in 1998 when the last round of expansion rose MLB to its current roster of 30 franchises, we would have seen one with the 2017 Kansas City Royals, who finished the season with the AL’s sixth-best record at 80-82. If someone like that was to crash October, they could run the table and be the first team with a losing record to hoist the commissioner’s trophy, which Manfred once casually referred to as a “piece of metal.” And that’s what everyone else would be tempted to call it if, indeed, it was raised by an 80-82 team. 

Of course, let’s give Manfred the benefit of a bad idea. Let’s give him Year Three, Year Four, Year Five, and see if MLB keeps cranking out mid-level champions. “I think we need to give it a little time,” Manfred said, “We want the competition to be the best it can be.” 

You want that, Rob? Here’s an idea: Get rid of the wild cards. Okay, be fair—I’ll leave you one, because there’s probably that scenario where a second-place team is better than a first-place club from another division. I’ll consider that a compromise and live with it. 

But who am I kidding? I’m spitting at the wind. More teams in October means more TV coverage, which means more money going into the owners’ pockets. Sure, Manfred can come to his noble senses and put the genie of greed back in the bottle. And if you believe that, I got a ballpark in Siberia to sell you. 

The 2024 postseason is upon us, and the set-up looks more balanced. No team is going to win 100 games in the regular season, while no one’s sneaking in with a .500 record or worse. The embarrassment factor is thus bound to be lower, so Rob Manfred can already start to breathe easier. Still, the messy mosaic of playoff miasma can beget another Fall Classic clash of seeds #5 and #6, with more yawns and less viewers. 

But what the hell. Everyone plays.