subject: Mlb Tickets- How New Mlb Wild Cards Change Strategy [print this page] Baseball is a game where fans young and old believe that things which aren't broken don't need to be fixed. In the history of baseball, radical changes to the structure of the game don't happen that often. The American League adopted the designated hitter in 1973. Major League Baseball expanded league divisions from two to three in 1994, adding the first Wild Card. Expansion teams to baseball happen about once every two decades. Baseball isn't a sport that shakes things up very often in an attempt to sell more MLB tickets, but it's one of the newest rule changes, effective in 2013, that will attempt to increase the game's popularity.
Major League Baseball has announced that it's going to add a second Wild Card to both the American and National Leagues. Is this a good idea? Should they have left the structure the way it is? What are the arguments for or against it?
Those who are against adding a second Wild Card team to each league argue that mediocrity can be awarded. Take the dominating American League (AL) East, for example. The division has three teams -- New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, and Tampa Bay Rays -- that contend year in and year out with payrolls of different sizes. If things were different and one of those teams was in another division, it's possible that "third-best team" in the AL East could be the best team in another division. The two Wild Cards will go to the two teams with the best records that are not leading their division.
Hypothetically, the third-best team in the AL East could have a better record than the other teams in the AL Central and AL West. As fans know, anything can happen in the postseason. If that second Wild Card team gets on a hot streak and wins the World Series, people would question why a third-place team which wasn't "good enough" to win its division (let alone win more than the second-best team in the division) was eligible to win the World Series. However, Wild Card teams have won it often in the past, and after time passes, people tend to forget that a World Series-winning team was a Wild Card.
The benefit to baseball is that it will create additional races in both leagues, as it increases the chance for other teams "on the bubble" to get into the postseason and win the World Series. Twenty years ago, when baseball had two divisions (East and West) in each league, teams knew they had no chance to make the postseason when the best teams dominated their division. With little chance to catch up to them, they were forced to trade away star players and build for the future. Now that more teams will be in it to win it throughout the season, they won't have to make those difficult decisions to trade away homegrown players and alienate their fan bases. Divisional races could go down to the wire next year between multiple teams, increasing the support of fans and selling more tickets in the process.
