Column: Playoff expansion not a cure for MLB's problems

The NFL has provided many great news stories to write about in recent days. (Who doesn’t love contributing their own mock draft? And I am not sick of lockout talk by any stretch of the imagination.) The fact of the matter, though, is that the NFL’s 50-day lockout and labor insecurity have convinced Bud Selig that baseball, sagging in popularity relative to the NFL, must make dramatic changes in the game to attract fans. Specifically, Selig, who plans to retire at the end of the 2012 season, wishes to add another playoff team in each league, bringing the total to five.

The logistics of this plan are still being worked out, though it seems inevitable that Selig’s idea will pass. Under the new system, the division winners from the East, Central and West would be counted as playoff teams, along with the top two remaining teams in each league. The two wild-card teams would play a short series (either a one-game contest or a two-out-of-three series) to decide which wild-card team would advance, and then the playoffs would be played out the way they are currently, with two series that are best of five, and one best of seven in each league to determine who attends the World Series.

Let’s start out with something visceral that I feel probably doesn’t truly count as a reason why this policy idea is a bad one. I strongly dislike what this idea would do to the feel of the playoff schedule. When playoffs come around, it is time for several teams to be engaged in playoff baseball at once, not four teams that are effectively playing divisional tiebreakers.

Additionally, baseball is a sport where a team uses its prolonged regular season success to position itself for the playoffs; therefore, having the two wild-card teams play a one-game playoff, even if it would “give a game seven feel to the beginning of the playoffs,” as some writers contend, is a questionable idea.

Consider last season’s playoffs in the American League. If five teams had gone to the playoffs, the Red Sox would have taken on the Yankees in a one-game playoff. Exciting, yes, but completely unfair: The Yankees had a six-win advantage over the Red Sox. They had the more successful season, and thus they deserved to move on to the divisional series, not to play for the right to advance.

At the very least, if these playoff changes become a reality — which, sadly, I know they will — MLB would have to be insane to make the first round of action a single-elimination playoff game. Baseball does consist of luck in great part, but building in a single-elimination playoff game would make playoff results overly randomized in a way that would be detrimental to the game.

Most importantly, though, MLB is tinkering with a pretty good formula. Wild-card teams have performed quite well since the playoff changes made in 1995 move four teams per league into the playoffs; four wild-card teams have been world champions in that time frame. Forcing the two wild-card teams to face each other unnecessarily lowers the playoff odds of the “true” wild-card winner. The most crucial element concerning Major League Baseball and the playoffs is a high level of competition: Because baseball’s season is so dreadfully long (I like that, but I know that I’m one of a few in that crowd), the end of the season is extraordinarily important in determining playoff berths and playoff seeding. With an extra team in the playoffs, the likelihood of several teams beginning the predictable pattern of resting starters a couple weeks before playoffs would be amplified. Moreover, MLB would be diluting the quality of playoff teams.

Admittedly, Selig’s decision to implement this potential playoff option is motivated by two strong reasons. First, the NFL’s labor uncertainty provides MLB with the opportunity to boom in popularity, at least in commissioner Selig’s mind. I would say that Selig is incorrect on that front; the NFL has such high popularity, because it has structured the league such that each game is of high importance in the postseason scheme, such that each game presents a highly competitive contest and such that the overall level of play in the NFL is very high for most teams, since the economic opportunities of teams do not differ as drastically as they do in the MLB. Thus, when the model to success is clearly to make the stretch run of the season highly contested so that the playoff seeding is not decided until the last days of the season, MLB should not be jeopardizing the very uncertainty of the September months that makes baseball great to watch.

Secondly, Selig probably has also been motivated by the dominance of the AL East in the past eight years of baseball. Whereas in the National League there is a consensus that any division might claim the wild card, increasingly over the past few years the expectation has been that baseball’s strongest division has all but clinched two playoff spots before the postseason begins. (In every year since 2002 except 2006, the AL East has a claimed a wild-card spot.) With the sense that baseball’s two economic powerhouses, the Yankees and the Red Sox, can buy or bargain their way into the playoffs each year, there is a growing sentiment of disgust among small- and medium-market teams that cannot compete with their spending or trading habits.

The solution, therefore, is not to add another playoff team, but rather to get rid of the gigantic payroll disparity that is at the root of the problem. If baseball truly wants to deal with its core issues, it should put a hard cap in place — a spending limit that no team can exceed — to stop the freewheeling habits of the Red Sox and Yankees. Until then, Bud Selig should leave the playoff system in place and not tamper with one of his few successful inventions.