DOES THE MLB WILD CARD NEED ANOTHER TWEAK?

I’ll start off by saying I’m not a baseball purest and I am generally a fan of the wildcard. After many years of seeing my beloved Red Sox miss out on the playoffs even with a great record, the addition of an additional wild card was a welcome change. Like most fans, the fact that the extra wild card resulted in a one game playoff wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for. This year, the format may really cause a lot of fan bases to question the setup.

Below are screenshots of the current standings in the American League. If these standings are carried forward to the last week of the regular season, the baseball postseason will be a mess.

With both the AL East and AL West in dead heats, the top two teams in both divisions will be pulling out all of the stops to win their division. Meanwhile, in the AL Central the Indians can begin the process of resting players since they are in the driver’s seat of their division with a .529 winning percentage.

Once the regular season is over the runner-ups in both the East and West get to again go all-in for one more game in an attempt to really be in the postseason. Mind you, if current winning percentages hold, that will be a team with a winning percentage of .676 facing a team that’s .643. So we are talking both teams are more than .100 points better than the winner of the Central.

After winning the play-in game, one of these teams then gets to face a team with a .692 winning percentage. Meanwhile, a well rested team from the Central (barely above .500) gets to play a tired team from the West.

While a scenario like this isn’t likely to happen very often, the MLB should consider making a tweak to prevent this in the future. The tweak could be as simple as when both wild card teams have records .075 better than a division winner, the division winner participates in the play-in game.