This Race Is Perfect for a Wild Bunch

It’s a SigAlert stretching from Montreal to Manhattan Beach.

Definitely the best wild-card race ever and maybe the best race ever.

If that’s too much for the put-upon purists, when was the last time eight teams approached September separated by one game in the loss column and 1 1/2 in the standings, as the Dodgers and those seven other National League teams were going into Friday night’s games?

Of the congestion, Dodger catcher Paul Lo Duca shook his head and said:

“Several of us were sitting at the [meal] spread in Houston last night and we were watching SportsCenter when they put up the wild-card standings with the eight teams within a game and we all just started laughing. I mean, it’s unbelievable.”

What it would seem to be is part parity, part parody and, OK, total vindication for Commissioner Bud Selig.

It was 10 years ago this month in Boston that owners approved introduction of three divisions in each league and a wild card in 1995.

“I took a lot of criticism from the Bob Costases of the world,” Selig said from his Milwaukee office Friday, “but this is the ultimate response. It’s stunning.”

He referred, of course, to the NL’s eight-team wild-card race, which includes three teams -- the Houston Astros, St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago Cubs -- who were also grouped within 1 1/2 games of the Central Division lead beginning play Friday, and the American League’s three-team wild-card race involving the Oakland Athletics, Boston Red Sox and Seattle Mariners. Those three were separated by two games.

Some traditionalists still consider the wild card a race for losers, but then the Angels won the World Series as a wild card last year, and what was the industry to do short of three leagues once greed led to so many expansions and 30 teams?

“Once we got to 26 and 28 teams, we couldn’t go with the same format,” Selig said. “We’d have been consigning too many teams to no chance.

“As I’ve said to many baseball people in the last week or so, I’d hate to think where we’d be without [the wild card]. With due respect, all you have to do is look at the division races in the NL East and West. They were basically over on July 4.”

Conceding those two races to the runaway Atlanta Braves in the East and San Francisco Giants in the West, half of the NL’s 16 teams remain in playoff contention because of the wild card and unsettled Central.

In fact, at a time in the season when teams are normally dropping out of contention, it’s almost as if one or two are dropping in on the congested wild card every day.

“I said a few days ago that the team that wins six or seven in a row would be in pretty good shape,” Lo Duca said, “but now that you’ve got this many teams involved, you can run off a streak and still not even be leading.”

Of course, the Philadelphia Phillies and Florida Marlins seemed to have reduced the wild card to a two-team battle until the Phillies lost nine of their first 10 on a 13-game trip that continues this weekend in New York and the Marlins went 1-8 on a trip that ended Thursday.

“What we’ve done is let the whole rest of the National League back in it,” Phillie reliever Dan Plesac said in Montreal on Thursday after the Expos completed a four-game sweep. “It’s very frustrating.”

So frustrating that volatile Manager Larry Bowa finally reached the boiling point. He conducted a postgame meeting Thursday that veteran Philadelphia players termed the most explosive of his career.

As he had said before the game, “if I go crazy, it won’t [only] be in Philadelphia in the papers. It’ll go to Japan, it’ll go to Istanbul, that I snapped again.”

The foreign desks were just being alerted when pitching coach Joe Kerrigan, increasingly outspoken about his pitchers’ failure to follow game plans, engaged in a shouting match with 23-year-old right-hander Brett Myers, putting an exclamation point on the Bowa explosion and sending club officials scurrying to meet the team in New York in an attempt to put a lid on the Montreal eruptions.

“It doesn’t hurt that one of our wild-card competitors is having a little dissension,” one Dodger said Friday afternoon.

Of course, maybe it’s just what the Phillies needed. They rebounded from 1-9 and the rhetoric of Thursday to beat the Mets, 7-0, Friday night.

Similarly, the Marlins returned to the humidity of Miami, shook off the humility of their 1-8 trip and hung a 3-2 defeat on the undaunted Expos, who had returned to the wild-card race by winning 11 of their last 15 games, regenerating interest in Montreal with discount tickets and their sweep of the Phillies.

For the first time since 1997, the Expos averaged more than 20,000 for a series at Olympic Stadium and improved to 36-17 there, 18-5 since the All-Star game, as if making a belated case to stay at a time when their 2004 fate is still undecided. Unfortunately, they are scheduled for another of their so-called homestands in Puerto Rico while playing only six of their last 27 games in Montreal.

“Maybe I’ll take a picture of this place,” Manager Frank Robinson said of his team’s sudden love for Olympic Stadium, “and put it up in the clubhouse when we’re on the road. Maybe that way we’ll feel at home.”

With so many maybes and so many teams involved in the wild-card scramble, scoreboard watching is a task at this point, and Lo Duca said the Dodgers have to focus on two other tasks: Winning at home and winning against the West. They did both Friday night, beating the Colorado Rockies, 6-4, to remain 1 1/2 games behind the Phillies and Marlins in the type of race, pitching coach Jim Colborn said, baseball must have “had in mind when they designed the system.”

He added: “I’m sure it won’t be resolved until the end, and there’s going to be all kinds of permutations for you to work with.”

If I could define permutations I might be able to decipher this NL wild-card race.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

*--* NL Wild Card W L GB DR Florida 71 63 -- E2 Philadelphia 71 63 -- E2 Houston 70 64 1 C1 St. Louis 70 64 1 C1 Arizona 70 64 1 W2 Montreal 71 65 1 E4 Chicago 69 64 1 1/2 C3 Dodgers 69 64 1 1/2 W3 DR-Division rank

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