Master Index of Archived Threads


NL 2nd Wild Card

Frayed Knot Sep 21 2012 04:54 PM

With 5.5 (Nationals) 10 (Giants) and 11 (Reds) game leads atop the divisions, coupled with a comfortable (except for them) 6 game lead for the Braves, the race for the 2nd WC is about the only one left in the NL And yet it's a race that none of the early September leaders seem to much want. StL, which lost to the Cubs this afternoon in extras and is now a sub-.500 September team (9-10), holds the lead but it's now down to 2.0 games Behind them is hard-charging Milwaukee - two games out and 14-4 since Sept 1 The 7-10 Dodgers sit 2.5 out thanks to the Cards afternoon loss The just-swept-the-Mets Phils (13-5) are 3.5 out And Arizona (8-8) and Pittsburgh (4-14) are sub-.500 teams clinging to 5 game deficits - but at least the Pirates have the advantage of playing the Astros this weekend and, get this, the have the freakin' Mets next week. They might win the division with that stretch ahead of them. Braves are in Philly this weekend Brewers visit Washington Dodgers at Cincy Pirates at Houston DBacks in Colorado

Frayed Knot Sep 22 2012 07:19 AM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

And everything tightens up as a result of Friday's games. - Cards hold a 4-2 lead with two outs and none on in the 9th at Wrigley ... but blow that lead and then lose walk-off style in extras - Dodgers get a 2-RBI single from Matt Kemp to win in the 10th inning in Cincy - Brewers down by one in the 9th score three times off the Nationals to win - Diamondbacks win big in Colorado - And, alas, only the Pirates lose again among the wannabes

Frayed Knot Sep 26 2012 07:29 AM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

Atlanta clinches WC slot #1 And for slot #2 StL holds leads of 4.5 (LAD & Milw) and 5.5 games (Arz & Phil) with 7 to play Move along, there's nothing to see here. It's all over save for the speculation about the pitching match-up for the one-game death match.

Frayed Knot Sep 30 2012 06:28 AM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

Dodgers just 2 back of StL now that the Cards have lost two straight to the Nats including last night in 10 after going through all the trouble of tying it up in the 9th Milwaukee technically still alive for a tie for WC #2 sitting 2 & 4 games behind LAD & StL All three contenders finish out at home Cards: 1 more with Washington, then the Reds for 3 Dodgers: 1 more with Rox, then host (who else?) the Giants for 3. No gimmes for them there. Brewers: Today with Houston and then 3 with the Padres

Gwreck Sep 30 2012 10:16 PM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

Milwaukee lost and was eliminated. Both St. Louis and the Dodgers won; still a 2-game difference between them.

Frayed Knot Oct 02 2012 07:20 AM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

StL and LAD both win again, but a day off the calendar puts the Dodgers on the brink. Cards are 2 games up with 2 to go, or "Dormie" to put it into golf terms.

Frayed Knot Oct 03 2012 06:31 AM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

Cards lose ... but so do the Dodgers. So it's Cardinals at Atlanta on Friday for the WC play-in game. Bat-Time and Bat-Channel still TBD AFAIK

Lefty Specialist Oct 03 2012 08:48 AM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

Frayed Knot wrote: So it's Cardinals at Atlanta on Friday for the WC play-in game. Bat-Time and Bat-Channel still TBD AFAIK Bleh. Two teams I hate. Upside is that one of them will be gone soon.

Mets – Willets Point Oct 03 2012 05:21 PM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

Great so the 87-win Cardinals have a coin-flip chance of getting in the playoffs against a team seven wins their superior from a tougher division. Thanks Bud. This is so much fairer.

Gwreck Oct 03 2012 05:24 PM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

Frayed Knot wrote: So it's Cardinals at Atlanta on Friday for the WC play-in game. Bat-Time and Bat-Channel still TBD AFAIK 5:07 PM EDT on TBS.

bmfc1 Oct 03 2012 05:35 PM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

Mets – Willets Point wrote: Great so the 87-win Cardinals have a coin-flip chance of getting in the playoffs against a team seven wins their superior from a tougher division. Thanks Bud. This is so much fairer. Yes to this.

Frayed Knot Oct 03 2012 05:58 PM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

bmfc1 wrote: Mets – Willets Point wrote: Great so the 87-win Cardinals have a coin-flip chance of getting in the playoffs against a team seven wins their superior from a tougher division. Thanks Bud. This is so much fairer. Yes to this. Hey, you want to avoid being put in that situation then win your division. I strongly favor this system to the one it's replacing.

Mets – Willets Point Oct 03 2012 07:54 PM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

Maybe if they modify so that if the second WC team has less than 90 wins then there's no playoff and it goes automatically to the first WC team. Otherwise your just asking for shit-ass teams to sneak into the playoffs, and if that shit-ass team happens to be the Cardinals then they'll probably win the whole thing.

bmfc1 Oct 03 2012 07:57 PM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

Frayed Knot wrote: bmfc1 wrote: Mets – Willets Point wrote: Great so the 87-win Cardinals have a coin-flip chance of getting in the playoffs against a team seven wins their superior from a tougher division. Thanks Bud. This is so much fairer. Yes to this. Hey, you want to avoid being put in that situation then win your division. I strongly favor this system to the one it's replacing. I agree w/you FK in that this system is better than the previous system. It's not as good as no WC's (more divisions, perhaps) but it is better as it puts a premium on winning the division.

Mets – Willets Point Oct 03 2012 08:19 PM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

bmfc1 wrote: bmfc1 wrote: Mets – Willets Point wrote: Great so the 87-win Cardinals have a coin-flip chance of getting in the playoffs against a team seven wins their superior from a tougher division. Thanks Bud. This is so much fairer. Yes to this. Hey, you want to avoid being put in that situation then win your division. I strongly favor this system to the one it's replacing. I agree w/you FK in that this system is better than the previous system. It's not as good as no WC's (more divisions, perhaps) but it is better as it puts a premium on winning the division. Except that with unbalanced schedule and some divisions being stronger than others, winning the division is not necessarily a sign of excellence, just the least bad team rising to the top, while stronger teams in other divisions go home. The three division system rewards mediocrity and the addition of any team that can scrape together enough wins to snag the second wild card and get into the playoffs on a coinflip exacerbates the rewarding of mediocrity.

bmfc1 Oct 03 2012 08:24 PM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

I agree with you MWP--but I also think that this system is better than the system that preceded it. Would you support more divisions and no WCs?

Mets – Willets Point Oct 03 2012 08:30 PM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

bmfc1 wrote: I agree with you MWP--but I also think that this system is better than the system that preceded it. Would you support more divisions and no WCs? I'd actually support fewer divisions if the numbers worked out. I think that a balanced schedule with the teams with the most wins (whether that's the top 3, top 4, or top 5) going to the playoffs is the most important thing.

Edgy MD Oct 03 2012 08:48 PM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

In all playoff systems, one team has more to recommend them than the other. The obvious end of the logic of not throwing lesser teams in with better teams is to just award the championship to the team with the best record in an even field of round robin play. I can get behind that, certainly, but given our options --- last year's system vs. this year's --- I'll take this year's.

Frayed Knot Oct 03 2012 10:02 PM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

I agree with you MWP--but I also think that this system is better than the system that preceded it. Would you support more divisions and no WCs? More - and, as a result, smaller - divisions would really suck IMO. A 8x4 system for instance (8 divisions with 4 teams each after a two-team expansion) is often suggested but I see two main problems: 1) How many "good" teams are there in an average season? Six? Eight? Ten? Well split those elite squads up among more and more divisions means that the odds of getting more than one in any division at the same time goes down substantially resulting in races being largely a thing of the past. The splitting into and later further subdividing of the leagues (from a single 10 team group - to two 2x6s - to the current 3x5s) is essentially what made the WC necessary. Look at the NFL since they switched to a 8x4 system. Even with their 1/10 that of MLB sized-sked, their divisions are sometimes virtually decided if not outright clinched with 1/4 of the season still to play. That's mid-August in baseball terms. 2) What's the schedule going to look like? If totally balanced then the odds of a weak division producing a "winner" with a near or even sub-.500 record increases as there are smaller pct of intra-division games to produce automatic wins. And even with an unbalanced sked there's only so unbalanced you can get with just 3 in-division opponents (vs 12? ... 18? ... 29? out-of-division) to where you're still looking at most of your games out of division (as opposed to the current approx 50/50) which, again, is more likely to produce a bad playoff team from whichever group is weak that year - the tallest midget in that year's circus so to speak. Bottom line is that any system that chooses more than one playoff contender runs the risk of matching two or more clubs with mis-matched records - witness the 1973 NLCS for instance or various pre-division World Series - and that if you want only winners contending in a post-season tourney with as few as possible mediocrities among them you have to either opt for: a) a smaller league or b) fewer and larger divisions

metirish Oct 04 2012 06:35 AM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

A friend posed a question on FB...how come the MFYs with the best record in the AL open up on the road agaist the wild card play in game winners? Same for the Nationals , one person responded that because of the new WC games a travel day was taken away from the division series because of the TV sked so in order for the team with the better record to get three games at home they open up with two on the road......not that I care about the MFYs but that if true is just bad.

Ceetar Oct 04 2012 06:48 AM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

metirish wrote: A friend posed a question on FB...how come the MFYs with the best record in the AL open up on the road agaist the wild card play in game winners? Same for the Nationals , one person responded that because of the new WC games a travel day was taken away from the division series because of the TV sked so in order for the team with the better record to get three games at home they open up with two on the road......not that I care about the MFYs but that if true is just bad. The justification was that the second wild card was decided well after scheduling, so to fit it in best this is a one year thing. I'm not sure I buy it though. Even given that they couldn't have pushed back the playoffs 1 day with 6 months notice it seems silly. Just ditch the off day before the 5th game if it comes to it. Yeah, it sucks if it's like Oakland-NY, but at least both teams are doing the traveling. equal footing and all. In this situation, if the home wild card team wins, they get to sit and wait for the Yankees to arrive. And if they don't win, both teams have to travel anyway. but screw 'em all.

Benjamin Grimm Oct 04 2012 07:40 AM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

bmfc1 wrote: Mets – Willets Point wrote: Great so the 87-win Cardinals have a coin-flip chance of getting in the playoffs against a team seven wins their superior from a tougher division. Thanks Bud. This is so much fairer. Yes to this. I agree. I don't like this new system. I like that it makes the division title meaningful, but the one-game playoff leaves us open to more travesties like we'll have if the Cardinals unseat the Braves tomorrow. I'd prefer it if this one-game playoff was instead a best-of-three.

Frayed Knot Oct 04 2012 07:42 AM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

People over-rate the hell out of home-field advantage. Sure you'd rather have it then not (particularly if you're the owner) but the edge is small (the home team in baseball traditionally wins less than 55% of the time) and in a 3-of-5 or 4-of-7 series the edge in games played home-v-road for the higher rated team is small as well (55%-60%). It's hardly do or die and was a concept rarely even discussed as baseball somehow went about eight decades being perfectly happy with it being an alternating year thing in the WS and LCS. It wasn't until the introduction of the wild card system that it even came up as those who claimed how necessary it was to include wild card teams almost immediately set about starting to think of ways to prevent those teams from actually winning. The concept of awarding home field to the better team, largely borrowed from other sports, became the only logical "remedy" even though it wasn't comparable to those sports where the home field is an all-or-nothing concept (football) or a huge statistical edge (basketball). Plus in other sports - particularly hoops and hockey - they hold out the home court/ice advantage thing as a must-have holy grail because without it the leagues (and the networks promoting them) would have to admit that most of their regular season is a meaningless march to nowhere where the best teams clinch a playoff spot by Thanksgiving and the >50% inclusion set-up means the mediocre ones are all going to make it anyway. Selling the idea that each rung moved up is absolutely crucial allows them to tag every mid-week game in February as "meaningful" even if at most it means that you get a potential 15 home games out of 28 instead of 14. BFD! In baseball's case, the 2-3 (starting on the road) system in a best of 5 still gives the better team the HF edge and I don't see where having the edge requires that you must have it at every single point during the whole series. Again, BFD! If you want to win and advance you're going to have to win games on the road too and what order the home/road games come up shouldn't matter. In the meantime, the 2-3 apparently fits into the calendar better and it cuts down on off/travel days. THAT travesty (see the entire 2009 playoffs) was a bigger crime than which game is played where could ever be.

Edgy MD Oct 04 2012 07:47 AM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

Benjamin Grimm wrote: I don't like this new system. I like that it makes the division title meaningful, but the one-game playoff leaves us open to more travesties like we'll have if the Cardinals unseat the Braves tomorrow. I'd prefer it if this one-game playoff was instead a best-of-three. I disagree that it'll be a travesty if the Cardinals beat the Braves. In order for the division title to be "more meaningful," the wild card team has to lose a chunk of their security. Hard to have it both ways.

Frayed Knot Oct 04 2012 07:50 AM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

Benjamin Grimm wrote: bmfc1 wrote: Mets – Willets Point wrote: Great so the 87-win Cardinals have a coin-flip chance of getting in the playoffs against a team seven wins their superior from a tougher division. Thanks Bud. This is so much fairer. Yes to this. I agree. I don't like this new system. I like that it makes the division title meaningful, but the one-game playoff leaves us open to more travesties like we'll have if the Cardinals unseat the Braves tomorrow. I'd prefer it if this one-game playoff was instead a best-of-three. I guess I just don't see it as a "travesty" if the lower WC team advances. Again, if the Braves don't like that situation then they need to win a division. And if the Cards advance then they're doing so in a weakened state having burned their (theoretical anyway) best pitcher and so the WC survivor now has less of a chance to win it all. Plus I like the drama of the one-and-out death-match and stacking an extra round (the 2-of-3 idea) while the other teams sit and wait is not what I think baseball needs as their post-season marches further into November.

Ceetar Oct 04 2012 07:53 AM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

There is simply no perfect system. There are examples for every situation which would be a 'travesty' depending on how you look at it.

Mets – Willets Point Oct 04 2012 08:12 AM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

I just think that since the Wild Card was introduced, more often than not the Wild Card team has been one of the better teams (by my accounting 24 of the 34 Wild Card winners from 1995 to 2011 had regular season records equal or better to one or more division champions in their league in the same season). People act as if "winning the division" is a great accomplishment but I think every year there are there's at least one division champion per league who is the weakest team in the playoffs. The whole idea that the Wild Card has to be "punished" for not winning the division when they are often better than division champions in the same league is what I find absurd.

Ceetar Oct 04 2012 08:19 AM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

Mets – Willets Point wrote: I just think that since the Wild Card was introduced, more often than not the Wild Card team has been one of the better teams (by my accounting 24 of the 34 Wild Card winners from 1995 to 2011 had regular season records equal or better to one or more division champions in their league in the same season). People act as if "winning the division" is a great accomplishment but I think every year there are there's at least one division champion per league who is the weakest team in the playoffs. The whole idea that the Wild Card has to be "punished" for not winning the division when they are often better than division champions in the same league is what I find absurd. Yes but..the system always protects the best team. sure, a Wild Card may be better than another division team (Record wise anyway, random fluctuation and unbalanced schedules leave me unconvinced most times) but they're never ever the best team. A point of contention here I guess is if the Orioles and Yankees had tied for best record and had to play today. Would've sucked for the Yankees when they lost and were relegated to Wild Card after having the best record through 162, but again that's protecting the absolute best record team, the Orioles.

Mets – Willets Point Oct 04 2012 08:25 AM Re: NL 2nd Wild Card

By the way, for more on details radical, alternate solutions to improve fairness and competition in MLB, read this brilliant blog post.