Wild-Card Games Give Suckers an Even Break

Baseball used to be a simple game. Nine men on a side, not 10. Ballparks with grass in them, not rugs.

There were 16 teams in the game, eight to a league. They played each other 22 times a year, 11 at home, 11 on the road. There was a neatness to it, a form, a symmetry. Every schoolboy knew the math.

You had a real, honest-to-God champion. The playing field was absolutely level. Every team played every team precisely the same times and way. The pennant meant something. No mediocrity fell through the cracks. The winner deserved the designation “world champion” 99 times out of 100.

Occasionally, the inferior team won a World Series. Not a fluke, exactly, just the way the cards fell. No one will ever convince me, for example, that the 1969 New York Mets were better--certainly not four out of five games better--than the Baltimore Orioles. The Mets had great pitching but invisible power and, in fact, invisible hitting. Only one regular batted .300.

But that was the first year of the two divisions and a best-of-five playoff to decide the championship. There is an axiom in baseball that pitching is 75% of a short series. And the Mets had Nolan Ryan as a relief pitcher that year to give you an idea. When you face a staff not even Nolan Ryan can crack, playing them three out of five can be like trying to win a wrestling match in a straitjacket.

I think the game lost a little of its integrity that year, but there’s no getting away from the idea that television’s eyes did light up. Television has very little stake in integrity. Ratings are its Holy Grail.

You see, one of baseball’s principal difficulties had been September games in an already-decided pennant race. They were studies in futility, and people went to see them only to get out of the rain or kill time. Television might as well be showing test patterns.

Baseball had had the sports scene to itself for such a long time, it had grown, if not complacent, at least smug. Supercilious. Tamper with the grand old game?! Why, the very idea!

But, tamper they had to. Or lose sports’ right arm--television.

Baseball, like all sports, was always show business, but no one wanted to admit it. It preferred to take the position the sport was some kind of state religion. It reveled in the designation “the National Pastime. “

But of late, other sports have begun to elbow baseball aside--pro football, pro basketball, which had been kind of Gypsy enterprises by comparison for a long time. They didn’t have integrity, they had playoffs.

Of course, football was not baseball. It had a 14-game season versus baseball’s 162-game season. Some teams didn’t meet each other for years on end in regular scheduling. And teams that finished poorly the year before had cushy schedules. Pro football strove for parity. English translation: mediocrity. It had all the integrity of a guy with his own deck on shipboard. And basketball’s idea of integrity was home-court advantage.

Baseball kept being told it was a 19th Century sport that should have gone out with open trolleys and gas lamps. But it kept stubbornly insisting it was keeping faith with its past, keeping records meaningful, clinging to integrity.

But we all know what happens to integrity in this society. It’s for dupes, dopes, not for wise guys. It, too, has gone the way of open trolleys. There’s a name for people who practice integrity today--victims.

It’s like a dotty old professor with patches on his elbows and pipe in mouth who wants to protest the decline in traditional values. The society is bored with him. It wants flash, hype, noise, hullabaloo, not character. It’s a sucker for sickos. If you don’t think so, check the talk-show circuit. Barnum knew. So did Nero. As the movie brokers used to say “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” They didn’t give you Shakespeare. They gave you “Showgirls.”

So, baseball sighed and, so to speak, went blue jean and sockless. Joined the riffraff. Went to multiple playoffs. The wild-card system. Two teams get in on a pass, not on a prowess.

No professional gambler will play a wild-card game. It gives the sucker an even break. But does baseball have any option? Does it hold fast to its traditional values--all the way to extinction?

Let us see what it is faced with. Cleveland, which won its division by a whopping 30 games (in a 144-game season) must beat the Boston Red Sox, which would have finished 14 games behind Cleveland in the old system. Then, the Indians will have to beat the New York Yankees, who finished 21 games behind them.

Of course, even under the old format, a season won-and-lost record did not always signify the World Series winner. In 1954, Cleveland set a record with 111 victories but lost the World Series (in four straight!) to the New York Giants, who won 97 games.

In 1973, under the new format, the New York Mets won only 82 games and lost 79 for the season, yet beat the Cincinnati Reds, who had won 99 games, in the playoffs. And in the World Series, they nearly beat the Oakland A’s, who had won 94 games. So you would have had a “world champion” who was three games over .500 for the season. In 1940, 82 victories would have gotten you fourth place--in an eight-team league.

But baseball has no choice. Its standards are in tatters. John McGraw would be apoplectic. Regardless of how the new system pains the purists, baseball has to do it. It’s that simple. It has to join the slow retreat from old verities and link up to a century in which professionals play Olympic basketball, felons play college football, temper tantrums take over tennis, everyone is champion in boxing, and in most sports you play a whole season just to run a couple of ribbon clerks out. Expediency counts over morality, and television counts over all.

The whole society is a wild card. So I guess you just have to say to baseball “Shut up and deal!”