Selig’s Wild Pitch Has Hit the Mark

Baseball, for a hundred years, didn’t care much for anything wild.

As an institution, it was as unpredictable as gray flannel, as flexible as Kenesaw Mountain Landis’ collar.

The game’s notion of innovation was to scrape five inches of dirt from the pitcher’s mound, let Ron Blomberg hit for Mel Stottlemyre, and introduce the plastic cup.

It was with some temerity just more than a decade ago that Commissioner Bud Selig scattered the divisions, expanded the playoffs and invited the masses.

So, Selig’s public awoke this morning with 12 days left in its baseball season, and 13 teams either in the playoffs, on the verge of them or with a dreamer’s chance at them.

Bobby Unser, the professional race car driver and amateur philosopher, once observed, “Nobody remembers who finished second but the guy who finished second.”

Oh, but Bobby ...

In baseball, for three consecutive Octobers, they’ve held parades for second. Second changed the course of a franchise in Anaheim. Second momentarily saved the game in South Florida. Second ended 86 years of misery in Boston.

Second has been pretty good to baseball lately.

Which brings us to the final games of 2005, and to the Cleveland Indians, New York Yankees and Oakland Athletics in the American League, and the Houston Astros, Philadelphia Phillies, Florida Marlins and Washington Nationals in the National League, along with those division leaders who could fall from first place right into Selig’s safety net.

It is the wild card, the modification of a game that built its history resisting change for the sake of resisting change. A format once better left to the other professional leagues -- those not called the national pastime -- the wild card and a thicker postseason once bore hysteria and now uphold optimism, translated in front offices as ticket sales, TV ratings and bustling team stores.

Seven weeks ago, the Indians were 15 games behind the Chicago White Sox. They dutifully lowered their cap brims and went out after what was left -- wild-card involvement. On Tuesday morning, after 23 wins in 29 games, a little help from the slumping A’s and pitching catastrophes in the Bronx, the Indians led the AL wild-card race by 1 1/2 games. In an accidental consequence, they were within 2 1/2 games of the first-place White Sox.

Given the choice over breakfast, Indian General Manager Mark Shapiro routinely has gone first to the standings within the standings, then to the AL Central.

“I’ve been looking at the wild card first for a long time,” he said. “I think I’d look at wherever we were in first.”

In a time of rebuilding, during which they lost much of their 1990s fan base, the Indians have found honor and salvation in the wild card, but will take the postseason where it falls.

“I think there’s been a general skepticism in the game, a lot of people inside and outside of Cleveland waiting for us to collapse,” Shapiro said. “It’s been so hard for people to believe. But if we’re still standing by the last weekend, either race, it doesn’t matter.”

The Yankees have lugged their $203-million payroll closer to the AL East-leading Boston Red Sox than to the Indians. Conceivably, the Yankees and Red Sox could play their season-ending series at Fenway Park not to eliminate one, but to determine who goes to the playoffs as a division winner and who goes as the wild card, a concept abhorrent to traditionalists. As objectionable in conservative circles, in the decade of the wild card, only five teams with baseball’s best record have reached the World Series, according to STATS LLC, and only one -- the 1998 Yankees -- won it.

At the end of the 1996 season, when the Dodgers and San Diego Padres played three games simply for seeding purposes, Mike Piazza suggested the winner be rewarded with “a bowl of fruit.” So motivated, the Padres swept the Dodgers on that final weekend, and both were swept in the division series.

More often since, wild cards have entered the postseason playing as well or better than any of the division champions. According to STATS, wild-card qualifiers since 2000 have a .686 winning percentage in September. Since Aug. 31 this season, the wild-card leading Indians are 14-4, and the Astros are 12-7. None of the division winners had won more than 10 games through Monday.

The Phillies won two of three at Florida this weekend, played to within a game of the Astros, and their closer, Billy Wagner, uttered the words that carry wild-card hopefuls: “How many times have we been written off?”

The answer: About as often as the Astros and Indians were, as often as the Marlins and Yankees were, and now look at them.

“We’re not doubting ourselves,” Marlin first baseman Carlos Delgado said.

With the final two weeks littered with crucial series -- Indians at White Sox, White Sox at Indians, Angels at A’s, Nationals at Marlins, Yankees at Red Sox -- the wild-card contenders are encouraged, and the division leaders are straining, and the public is watching.

Even the Nationals, nine games out of first in the NL East, 2 1/2 games out of last, are perhaps a week’s worth of wins from serious contention. The Astros’ schedule (two games in 12 against winning teams) and pitching is superior, but the Phillies play the Braves this week, then finish the season at Washington, where the Nationals play nine of the last 12 games.

As one of the National relievers, Gary Majewski, recently told Washington reporters, “It’s not over until it’s over, until they put an ‘X’ by our name.”

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Something wild

Eight times in the first 10 seasons of wild-card competition the postseason berth has been decided by two games or less. The wild-card teams, with record and number of games ahead in the wild-card standings:

*--* Lg Team W L Pct. GA 1995 AL New York 79 65 549 1 1/2 NL Colorado 77 67 535 1 1996 AL Baltimore 88 74 543 2 1/2 NL Dodgers 90 72 556 2 1997 AL New York 96 66 593 12 NL Florida 92 70 568 4 1998 AL Boston 92 70 568 4 NL Chicago * 90 73 552 1 1999 AL Boston 94 68 580 7 NL New York * 97 66 595 1 2000 AL Seattle 91 71 562 1 NL New York 94 68 580 8 2001 AL Oakland 102 60 630 17 NL St. Louis 93 69 574 3 2002 AL Angels 99 63 611 6 NL San Francisco 95 66 590 2 1/2 2003 AL Boston 95 67 586 2 NL Florida 91 71 562 4 2004 AL Boston 98 64 605 7 NL Houston 92 70 568 1 * won one-game playoff

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