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“Baseball’s one-game play-in for each league’s two wild-card teams is too random a way to determine which team gets to advance,” Zorn declared in the Tribune Sunday and on his blog site. “Single games can have utterly flukey results.” He’s right about that. The teams with the best records in baseball this season—the Red Sox and Cardinals—won three out of every five games. In baseball, victory never comes anywhere close to being guaranteed.
This is a bad idea, and it’s bad for the reason Zorn already acknowledged: the shorter the series, the likelier a flukey result. The team that has to win only three games to advance also has to lose only three games to be eliminated. You would never penalize the team with the best record by making it play a one-game series. So how is a five-game series a reward?
