Major League Baseball

Just sit back and enjoy this wild card World Series

Updated Mar. 4, 2020 11:20 p.m. ET

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So we're all set, then, for a weekend without any baseball. The Royals did away with the Orioles in the minimum number of games, and the Giants almost did that same thing to the Cardinals. So out of a possible 14 LCS contests, we got nine of them, and now we're set up for a showdown that isn't exactly improbable, but that wasn't predicted by (m)any. The Royals are in the World Series, after winning 89 games and after having once been 48-50. The Giants are in the World Series, after winning 88 games and after having once been 63-57. It's going to be a World Series between two wild-card teams, and that's absolutely terrific.

Major League Baseball is getting what it wanted from this postseason. And I don't just mean in terms of the drama, although I think we've all been aware of that. The series haven't been long, but the games have just about all been close. As one example, during the regular season, 19 percent of all plate appearances occurred with a score deficit of at least four runs. In the playoffs, that's dropped all the way to 9 percent, and there were only three such plate appearances in the whole ALCS. It's absurd how suspenseful and electrifying this has all been, but then that's something more particular to this postseason. The wild-card thing is a bigger-picture issue.

It's ... I don't know, what's a good word? Controversial? The argument against being, wild-card berths dilute the level of talent in the playoffs. So perhaps the wild-card teams are undeserving, and then what does that tell you if you get a pair of them in the championship? What does a World Series title tell you about a team, if it's a series between two teams who failed to win their divisions?

It tells you that a team beat another team in a baseball tournament. It tells you nothing more, and it's not designed to tell you anything more. Tournaments thrive on drama and unpredictability. What baseball's got set up is a hell of a tournament, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with a couple of wild-card teams surviving to the end. In another sport, we'd call them Cinderellas.

There exists a certain sense that a championship ought to go to the best team in the league. From that standpoint, further dilution reduces the odds of such, and that's interpreted as a bad thing. But there are a number of problems with this, including but not limited to the impossibility of identifying a best team. A best team when? Over a whole season? Just at the end of it? If you have just a two-team World Series, and skip the first few rounds of the playoffs, can't the supposed best team lose? Any playoff tournament is going to have a certain degree of randomness to it. You can try to resist it, but that's a losing battle. Best is ambiguous, best is subjective. And even if you could determine matter-of-factly which team is the best, do you really want a tournament that just gives that team a trophy every time? What would be the point?

We don't want perfect, non-random tournaments, just like we don't want perfect, non-random regular seasons, projected with 100 percent accuracy. The better choice is to embrace the randomness, to welcome the noise that is this whole month of baseball, if not all seven of them. Baseball is a sport, and a sport is entertainment, and the playoffs are theater. Good theater surprises you, and if it didn't, no one would want to see it.

Let's talk about the talent dilution real quick. The last three years, division winners have averaged 94.5 wins. The first wild cards have averaged 92. The second wild cards have averaged 90. No team has made the playoffs as a wild card while winning fewer than 88 games. There is no meaningful difference between 90 wins and 92 over the course of a full season, and bad teams still haven't sneaked into the playoffs. And it's worth noting that baseball actually incentivized winning the division by introducing the second wild cards. Of course, with every additional playoff slot, worse and worse teams get included. There is no tipping point beyond which things get unreasonable -- it's always just a matter of percentage points. We aren't yet where bad teams make the playoffs. But even if we were, so what? What if all 30 teams made the playoffs? Why would that even necessarily be a bad thing, aside from how long the hypothetical would take to play out?

But, all right, that's getting extreme. Let's pull back. The current state of things has good teams in the playoffs, joined by slightly less good teams. Any of those teams could win the championship. That's the whole magic of it. Maybe you want to see the best team rewarded more often. But, how do you intend to determine the best? The Royals, for example, had the American League's second-best record after the All-Star break. They were behind only the Orioles, who they beat. Aren't the Royals one of the best teams now? As for the Giants, they've gone 8-2 in the playoffs, and the Dodgers went 1-3, and if you combine everything, then the Giants are only two games behind the Dodgers in the standings. Isn't that a small enough gap to say maybe the Giants are about as good? What if they had Matt Cain? What if they'd had more of Brandon Belt?

I don't know what being the best team is. I don't know how long it lasts, or how much it fluctuates. What do you do about injuries? Should the Orioles be blamed for losing Manny Machado and Matt Wieters? Should the Angels be blamed for losing Garrett Richards? Is it more important to be better early on, or late, or over the whole season? Who's the most "deserving" champion -- the team that was best overall, from the start, or the team that built something and improved through the second half? I know this is getting weird and philosophical, but, see, there are these two things:

(1) No tournament will ever always reward the best team.

(2) Who can even say what a best team is?

If your best team is simply the team with the most wins, great, that's obvious. But then there's no sense in playing more games. If you're going to play more games, you know from the beginning it's going to be random to a significant extent, so if that's going to be part of it, you just have to enjoy it for what it is. The better teams will win more often than the worse teams, and that's true all the time, but there are opportunities for upsets and I don't think the upsets are out of hand. They basically can't be, on account of math.

Look at what we have. We've had an awesome few weeks of high-leverage baseball. Good teams have played other good teams, and some of them have won and some of them have lost. With the wild cards, more fans got to keep following for longer than they would otherwise, meaning more fans got to think about the slim chances of a deep playoff run. Giants fans got to stay plugged in even as the team remained behind the Dodgers, and though the Giants wound up with fewer wins, they were plenty good. More teams means more excitement, and that's quite literally the only purpose of this. That's why this exists. I mean, it exists so rich people can get richer, but they get rich off of our own voluntary spending on the product.

I'm all about adjusting the playoffs to more closely resemble the regular season. With fewer off days, teams couldn't disproportionately feature only their best players. You'd get deeper into rotations and deeper into bullpens and benches, and in that way the playoffs would be more like the six months before them. But I'm fine with the number of teams that make it, and I'm fine with the potential for a pair of wild cards to square off for the World Series championship. That's what we've got now, and I don't feel any worse about baseball than I would if it were Nationals vs. Angels. These playoffs have caught me completely by surprise, and that's the biggest possible point in their favor. We all tuned in to see a show. The story's delivered.