Phillies Foul Balls

Is his latest Around the Majors report, Lee Sinins mentions that MLB has made a change to how they figure out the wild card in case of a playoff. I think the simplest way of explaining it is that any one-game playoff to figure out a division winner no longer counts as a regular season game for the purposes of figuring out the wild card standings. While I think that’s a sensible move, if that’s really true, that could cause all sorts of mayhem this season.

In fact, here’s Fox Sports’ nightmare situation. The Cardinals, Astros, and Cubs all finish the season at 87-75 and so must have the first ever three-way playoff to determine the division winner. The established framework for this situation is for one team to get lucky and get a bye, while the other two play one game with the winner then playing the team with a bye. Now on top of that, suppose the Phillies, Marlins, and Diamondbacks also all finish at 87-75, tied for the wild card lead. Under the old rules, there would be a similar three team scenario for the wild card and the games could be played on the same days as the NL Central playoff games, ESPN gets doubleheaders both days and the Division Series only take a minor scheduling hit with likely one game moved back from Tuesday to Wednesday. Ugly, but not awful. However, under the new rules, there will now be a five-way tie for the wild card spot and what’s more, the teams involved in that tie won’t be known until after the NL Central playoffs are done. Presumably the way they’d break a five-way tie would be to seed the teams one through five, have four play five with the winner playing the one seed and two playing three. Finally the winners of those two games meet for the wild card spot. Presumably that takes three days to do, and unless they rule that the NL Central teams get two of the top three seeds, then that can’t overlap with the NL Central playoffs. Even if they did, they could only overlap the first game. Put all of that together and you’re looking at a situation where the NL Division Series couldn’t start until Friday at the earliest, with Saturday more likely. That in turn messes up the League Championship Series schedule and gets Fox very, very cranky.

Granted, while this is all a pretty slim possibility, if a situation does arise that put the regular playoff schedule in jeopardy, I wonder if MLB will change some of their standard operating proceedure for tiebreaker playoffs. For example they might have a three team playoff all happen in one location and play it as a doubleheader. That raises the possibility of one of these games being played at a “neutral” site which is an idea whose time really never should come.

The playoff chase is a mess of mediocrity, but it is producing some interesting side stories.