All four of baseball's Wild Card series were decided via two-game sweeps — but where in the American League the third-seeded Minnesota Twins defeated the sixth-seeded Toronto Blue Jays, in the National League the third-seeded Milwaukee Brewers lost to the sixth-seeded Arizona Diamondbacks.
This means that Arizona will play the second-seeded Los Angeles Dodgers in the Division Series, while the fourth-seeded Phillies, who defeated the fifth-seeded Miami Marlins, will be forced to play the Atlanta Braves, who had the best record in the majors during the regular season.
On what planet is this fair — Talos IV?
And doesn't anybody think that it is just a little too "convenient" that the Diamondbacks lost their last four regular-season games?
Did they tank these games to avoid a possible meeting with the Braves until the NLCS?
Re-seeding the teams after the Wild Card Series will keep everyone honest. And besides, there is no reason not to do it.
In addition, it will not push the postseason back — although something else that should be done would, unless the regular season schedule is rolled back to its "traditional" 154 games. (Have you hugged a "purist" lately?)
Furthermore, every team that makes the playoffs is entitled to host at least one postseason game — and this will be made possible by having the lower-seeded team host Game 2 of each Wild Card Series, with a travel day both before and after.
How do we know that had the Marlins won Game 2 of their series against the Phillies in Miami, and then the series went back to Philadelphia for a Game 3, that the Marlins might have won that game as well, and therefore the series?
And in a 154-game schedule, each team plays all four of their division rivals 12 times (instead of this season's 13), all 10 of the teams in the other two divisions within the same league six times (instead of four of them seven times and six of them six times, as was the case this season), with interleague play remaining unchanged.
This means that the regular season can always end on the last Sunday in September — often resulting in the playoffs ending earlier despite the extra two days it will take to play the Wild Card Series — leading to both the regular season beginning and the postseason ending in better weather than they begin now (and remember that April is when average temperatures get warmer fastest, and October when average temperatures get colder fastest).
And the excuse for adding eight games to the regular season was that it allowed every team to play the other nine teams in their league 18 times, when under the 154-game schedule they played all of the other teams 22 times.
Yet when both leagues expanded to 12 teams each in 1969, every team could have played every other team 14 times, thus returning to the 154-game schedule. But Bowie Kuhn, baseball's commissioner at the time, said, "It wouldn't be practical to have a first-place team and a twelfth-place team."
What he really meant is that it wouldn't make the owners, for whom he worked, enough money.
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