Last night, the Phillies won, 14-9, over the Nationals in Washington, while the Cardinals lost at home to the Diamondbacks, 4-3. These results left the Phillies one percentage point behind the Cardinals in the race for the National League's all-important top wild card spot — all-important because the top wild card gets to play all three games of their Wild Card Series at home, rather than having to go on the road in Game 2, which would be much fairer.
As for why the Cardinals lead for the top wild card, it is because they, at 42-35, have a .545 winning percentage — while the Phillies are 43-36, which comes out to .544 (interestingly, the teams have yet to play each other, with three games at St. Louis on August 10-12 and three at Philadelphia on August 21-23).
Next time something like this happens again, remember that when two teams are the same number of games over .500, the team that has played fewer games (if applicable) will always have a higher winning percentage (if the two teams under .500, the team that has played more games will always have a higher winning percentage).
Of course, this could never happen at the end of the season — although in 1972, it did. That season, which began with the MLBPA on strike, ended with not all teams having played the same number of games; and sure enough, the 84-69 (.549) Astros finished one percentage point ahead of the 85-70 (.548) Dodgers, thus entitling Houston to two and three-eighths of one percent of that year's postseason Players' Pool, to five-eighths of one percent for Los Angeles.
1972 also provided another oddity: when the Phillies finished a half game ahead of San Diego (59-97 to 58-95) yet one percentage point behind the Padres (.378 to San Diego's .379), that sent Alan Bannister of Arizona State to Philadelphia as baseball's top draft choice. Bannister went on play a dozen years in the majors, retiring in 1985.
(The circumstances in the American League that year were even more decisive: in the AL East, the division in which they played back then, the Tigers ended up having played — and won — one more game than the Red Sox, and won the division title on that basis.)
In those days it was common parlance for TV and radio announcers to say that a team was, for example, "two and a half games out of first place, three in the loss column" if the former, at that point, will have played one more game than the latter, not even thinking about which team had played more games overall.
But once the percolating labor dispute — more likely to lead to a lockout than a strike if the owners stand firm in their quest for a salary cap — runs its course, it will be time for some relevant changes to be made; and since expansion and/or realignment will not come right away, other issues can be addressed sooner (and realignment, with or without expansion, should never reduce the number of teams in any division to less than five: let the travails of pro football's NFC South be their guide on that score; and what the 1994 MLB strike prevented — a team winning their division with a record that was 10 games under .500 — should never be given the chance to happen again).
And the first place to start is to guarantee the lower seed in the Wild Card Series Game 2 at home. If the owners feel the need to compress the balance of the postseason calendar to bring this about, there is no reason not to move up dates in the event that early series are swept or otherwise do not go the maximum number of games. Why have two idle teams wait a week to play their next series?
Right behind this is the abolition of the "ghost runner" in extra-inning games (regular season games only). So what if a regular-season game goes the baseball equivalent of a double or even triple-overtime game in college football?
And even if the concept of a team finishing ahead of (or behind) another team "by percentage points" ends up being irrelevant in nearly every single case, it will remain in baseball's glossary forever.
However, there is still time to slam on the brakes lest baseball fall over the cliff that another labor dispute sends it hurtling it into the ocean.
Meanwhile, protests over Pride Month observances overshadow negotiations in any effort to forestall the real disaster.
It's just like an inter-episode 1960s Batman re-run. Except that this is all too real — for all too many.
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