Welcoming the Second Wild Card (and the Astros)

still pisses me off a bit. I’m not sure if it has been discussed here at any length, but it seems pretty clear to me that the more you expand the playoffs the more you de-value the playoffs. The easier it gets to make it in, the less special they become. I’m thinking of teams like the Lakers or the Red Wings, who both play in leagues where half the teams make the playoffs and both fan bases just expect to get in. Even as dominant as the Yankees have been, their fans seem to feel privileged to make the playoffs, rather than entitled to the playoffs.

There is a lot to think about, and I haven’t thought about it too thoroughly yet, so I’m all ears (eyes) if someone wants to explain why two wild cards is good. Maybe I’ll wind up liking it in the end, but part of what makes the playoffs so special for baseball is that it is so tough to get into them in the first place.

What kind of godawful home&away uniforms will the Astros be wearing in ’13?

Nice try Selig. I’m onto your game.

Lining up rotations for the last week of the regular season, for teams that have a shot at the wild card, will probably give some managers migraines. Do you put your ace out there for the one-game playoff? Or do you trust someone else to do well enough for that, that you can line up the ace for the presumptive start of the 5-game division series the day after?

And then, suppose a team panicked (or just had no choice, due to rotation depth or injuries) and shoved their ace in there for the one-game playoff. If that WC team doesn’t have a solid rotation, they’re a huge mismatch against whatever division winner they face, as they’ll be going with their #2 and #3 pitchers, with their ace only able to pitch once for the whole series, and on 3 days’ rest at that.

So if anything, the second wild card might have nerfed the wild card altogether, and made it that much better for the division winners, as they can optimize their rotations for the whole playoffs.

This is assuming that there’s a measurable dropoff, on average, in the quality of starting pitcher from #1 to #2, on the pitching staff of your average wild card team. I don’t know how to quantify that, given how recent the wild card is.

Also, the articles on “who would have been in a one-game playoff if we had this 2nd wild card for a decade”, don’t indicate that any .500 team would be making it to this. So perhaps if a team is good enough to win 87, 88ish games, it’s got a rotation deep enough to still match ok against teams that won 93 games but just played in a division with a monster.

And of course this assumes that much of anything can be done, with any pitchers or position players, to make a huge difference for a team’s odds in a best-of-5 series.

that, at least for a year or two, we’ll get several extra games against a terrible opponent, which increases our chances of winning the Wild Card in and of itself.

Bayes’ rule is for conditional probabilities. Your formula is the law of total probability: P(playoffs) = sum_{win division} P(playoffs | win division) P(win division).