The American League has only one great team but a long list of teams still in the race for the postseason. Eric Karabell and David Schoenfield debate whether this year’s AL is fun or dull in its mediocrity.
When the second wild card was added back in 2012, my initial hesitation concerned two potential factors:
1. What if a second-place team with a great record had to play a team with a much inferior record and goes one-and-done?
2. The increased possibility of a mediocre team reaching the playoffs.
Both of these could happen this year. In the National League, the Pittsburgh Pirates might end up with the second-best record in the majors and be forced into the coin-flip game. Not only might they be forced to burn their ace Gerrit Cole in that game while the NL East and NL West winners — with worse records — get to rest and gear up for the Division Series, it’s possible they end up playing a team that has five or six fewer wins (right now, the Pirates are three wins better than the Cubs). If the Pirates switched divisions with the Phillies, they’d be seven games up on the Mets and sitting pretty. So by a matter of geography, they’re likely headed to the wild-card game for a third straight season. It’s the system we have. It’s not the fairest of systems.
Over in the American League, the battle for the second wild card currently lines up like this heading into Wednesday’s games:
Angels: 62-57
Orioles: 61-57
Rangers: 60-58
Twins: 59-60
Rays: 59-60
Tigers: 57-61
None of these teams are particularly good or particularly interesting. Sure, if you’re a fan of one of these teams, you’d rather be .500 with a chance at the playoffs than .500 and going nowhere.
The additional wild card will certainly provide for more games down the stretch this season that affect the playoff chase and are thus worth paying attention to, but is it really all that more exciting? It’s hard to find evidence that fans of these teams are especially enthralled with this wild-card race. Check out year-to-year average attendance per game:
Angels: -1,783
Orioles: +179
Rangers: -4,213
Twins: -567
Rays: -2,468
Tigers: -1,329
In the end, mediocrity is still mediocrity and fans don’t really get too excited about .500 teams. Maybe those figures will change a bit between now and the end of the season if all those teams remain bunched up, I don’t know. The Rangers have been a big surprise, hanging in there despite the season-ending injury to Yu Darvish, yet they’ve suffered the second-biggest attendance drop in the majors (only the Phillies have lost more fans per game this year). The Twins, even with a hot start, haven’t been able to carry that early momentum into attendance increases.
Aside from that, there’s a good chance we end up with an 83-win team in the playoffs. I get that this is the age of parity, but I still want quality in the postseason. Last year, we had two sub-90-win teams reach the World Series for the first time as two wild cards both made it. I do like my regular seasons to mean something, to separate the best teams from the mediocre. Isn’t that why we play 162 games? The playoffs are already enough of a crapshoot that an 83-win team can sneak in and win it all — see the 2006 Cardinals, who won a weak NL Central with 83 wins and then went on to capture the World Series.
I guess I just have to learn to separate these things. We have the regular season and then the postseason “tournament.” And the tournament crowns a World Series champion, not the best team in baseball.
