Baseball Fans and the Wild Card

I followed the baseball season fairly closely this year, especially the pennant races and post-season. I picked up on some conflicting sentiments that were attributed to fans on behalf of the media.

First, during the pennant races, I frequently heard about how much fans liked the wild card format that baseball has. Now that there are two wild card teams, the fans like it even better. You see, the wild card format creates extra excitement because there are more pennant races than there used to be, and the wild card format allows more teams to be in it at the end. Their regular seasons have more meaning.

Second, during the World Series I frequently heard about how TV ratings were so low. Fans simply weren't interested in a World Series played between two sub-90 win teams. (Both the Giants and Royals were wild card teams.) They wanted the top teams to face each other.

So, let me get this straight. The teams that the fans wanted to see in the pennant races were the teams they didn't want to see in the World Series? Huh? This may seem kinda simplistic, but you can't have teams making the playoffs that have no chance of winning the playoffs.

Post-Season Wild Card Success

Recent baseball wisdom holds that wild-card teams can be more successful in the post-season than their division winning counterparts because they are usually the hotter team right at the end of the season.  And, since more teams can be involved in a wild-card race than a division race, the team with the latest hot streak usually wins the wild-card.  I've been thinking about wild-card teams a lot in the past several years, so I decided to do a study of wild-card teams in the post-season.  The results were interesting.

There have been 18 post-seasons in the wild-card era; 1995-2012 (the strike in 1994 eliminated the first post-season with the wild-card format), with one wild-card team from each league.  That totals 36 wild-card teams.  For the sake of clarity, I'm only counting the wild-card team that won the one-game play-in for the 2012 season.

Overall, wild-card teams have won 34 post-season series and lost 31, for a .523 winning percentage of series.  In the NL, the results have been even better: wild-card teams have a 20-15 series record, for a .571 winning percentage.  If the Cardinals had won either of games 5, 6 or 7 against the Giants in the NLCS last year, that record would be 21-14, or a .600 winning percentage.

NL wild-card teams have fared better than AL teams overall, with NL teams going 10-8 in the NLDS compared to 9-9 for AL wild-cards in the ALDS.  Those NL teams that make the NLCS have won a startling 70% of those, compared to only 33% in the AL.  Wild-card teams have ten World Series appearances, winning 5 and losing five.  The NL teams are 3-4 in the WS and AL teams are 2-1.  One year, 2002, saw the two wild-card teams facing each other in the WS.

Looking at the data I compiled, it does seem true that the wild-card teams have an advantage in the post-season.

Expanded Playoffs With More Teams?

There's a proposal for expanding the playoffs for 2012.  Each league would have an additional wild card team.  Normally I would be opposed to such a thing, as I think there are more than enough teams in the post season as it is.  I don't like the wild card either.  Eight out of 30 teams make it (more than 25%), and that's too many.  But depending on how the format works, I might just be for it.

What would work for me is to add an additional wild card team for each league, but the two wild card teams in each league could have a one game play-in the day after the regular season is over to determine who plays in the regular format.  That way, no wild card team could feel safe with a late season surge to gain the wild card that carries over into post season and ends up winning the World Series just because they're the hottest the latest.  But an additional series between those two teams that allow all other teams an extended time off?  No way.

Wild Card Spells Death of the Great Pennant Races

The Giants and Padres (and Rockies!) just had a great pennant race.  The NL West wasn't decided until the last day of the season, and the two teams in the race were playing each other in the final of a three game series.  As great as the race was, it was diminished a bit by some bad ball played by both teams.  The two teams weren't the greatest.  There is, however, another kind of pennant race that is much better.

That kind of race is between two super-teams.  Teams that win a lot of games.  Upper 90's or 100+ win teams.  I was part of one of the greatest pennant races in history.  The 1993 race between the Giants and Braves, where each team was tied at 103 wins going into the last game of the season.  The Braves completed a season sweep of the Rockies, while the Giants lost to their arch rival Dodgers 12-1, who relished the spoiler role as one of the two greatest rivalries in baseball.  They knocked the Giants out of the race.  My 400 mile drive home from LA that evening was the longest of my life.  I-5 was a trail of thousands of Giants fans that made the trek.

This year had one such hypothetical pennant race.  The Yankees and Rays came out of the chute on fire, playing .700-.750 ball in the early part of the season.  They were clearly the best two teams in baseball the first half of the season.  They were neck and neck all the way down the stretch drive.  Going into the last day of the season, they had the same record, just like the Giants and Braves did in '93.  The Yankees even played their arch rivals, the Red Sox, on the last weekend of the season, in the other of the two greatest rivalries in baseball, just like the Giants/Braves race.  It went down to the last game of the season, just like the Giants/Braves, and the Red Sox beat them to knock the Yankees out of first place, just like the Giants/Braves.  It had all the marks of one of the great pennant races in recent memory.  Except it wasn't a pennant race.  Not even close.  Nobody even cared about it.  All season long.

The reason is that the race was so great that both teams were going to make the playoffs in the end.  There was no race.  There's not much difference at all in winning the division and winning the wild card.  Maybe a couple of home games in the playoffs.  Maybe.  It wasn't the exciting Olympic 100 meter finals.  It was a meaningless qualifying heat where everybody who is anybody makes it to the finals.  In fact, if you look at it from a probability standpoint, the better the record of the two teams, the more likely it is that the second place team will be the wild card.  So, the wild card has given an inversely proportional relationship between the greatness of the race and the excitement it creates.  It shouldn't have to be this way.

The Wild-Card Un-Race

Yawn. It's that time of year again when a giant glob of also-rans hovering at about five or six games above .500 vie for the almost-as-privileged spot as division winners earn. Yes, it's the wild-card race. But sitting in a lounge chair drinking pina coladas isn't considered a race. Nothing against sitting and drinking, as it has its place in life, but a "race" involves running. Is it a race when nobody is moving? I just saw the NL wild-card standings on FOX Saturday baseball, and the Brewers were shown in that list, just a few games out, but they were under .500 for the season. Oh, boy!

It's funny how the wild-card standings, which include all the teams in the league except three, start showing up in May. The Red Sox are only 1/2 game behind the Yankees on Memorial Day, but they're leading the wild-card race! Oh, boy! The standings won't show the Yankees, because by being 1/2 game better than the Sox they've played themselves out of the race, but they have as much chance of winning the wild-card. All they would need to do to get into the wild-card race would be to lose a few games.

Then there exists the confusing position of being in two races, the division race and the wild-card race. Your team is one game out in the division and one game out in the wild-card race, and the teams ahead of you in each race are playing each other. Who do you cheer for?

Just a few reasons I'm opposed to the three division plus wild-card format (and opposed to the overall NFL-ization in general) in baseball.