Sympathy for the Wild Card

It's been said that people in the Midwest are football fans, no matter what sport they follow. An excellent example of this principle can be seen in the wailing and gnashing of teeth that followed the Twins losing the first two of a three-game series in Seattle and thus falling two full games behind the division-leading White Sox.

As Howard Sinker noted in his own post linked above, the Twins trailed by two with 30 to play. In baseball terms, this is basically nothing -- leads of two games are lost in a week during the season, and there's no particular reason that late-season leads should be any safer than mid-season leads.

Of course, if you're talking football, then everything changes. In the NFL, a difference of two games can mean the difference between a division title and sitting home watching the playoffs on TV. In baseball, the majority of division titles are won by more than two games, and often by far more than two games. Of the 39 divisional races in the American League since 1995, only 7 have been decided by two games or less (though oddly enough, four of those have occurred in the past four seasons, once per season). Of those 7 teams that lost their division by 2 or fewer games, 5 went to the post-season anyway for winning the wild-card.

Which is another way you can tell that midwestern fans are football fans -- football fans don't seem to respect the wild card, because it doesn't seem as though many wild card teams do well. (Or more accurately, your team didn't do well when it last won the wild card.) Nevertheless, in the NFL since 1995 (the year MLB instituted the wild card), wild card teams have made it to the Super Bowl four times and won it three times (the 1997 Denver Broncos, the 2000 Baltimore Ravens, and the 2007 New York Giants). Granted, this is in an environment where each league has had two or three wild card teams to pick from (the NFL lost a wild card slot when re-aligning from three to four divisions per conference in 2002); certainly with just one wild-card team per league, MLB's wild-card teams don't do as well, right?

Well, no -- actually they've done better. Since 1995, wild card teams have made it to the World Series nine times and won it four times (1997 Florida Marlins, 2002 Anaheim Angels*, 2003 Florida Marlins, 2004 Boston Red Sox). The last time a World Series didn't include at least one wild-card team was in 2001.

* - In 2002, both the Angels and Giants were wild-card teams.

All of this 'history of the wild card' is relevant because, as the Twins try to regain some momentum in the divisional race in Oakland, the White Sox begin a three game series later tonight against Boston, and the current standings look like this:

AL EAST
Tampa   81-51
Boston  77-56 (4.5 back)

AL CENTRAL
Chicago   76-57
Minnesota 75-58 (1 back)

The Twins are one game behind the White Sox for the division lead, but they're also two games behind the Red Sox for the wild card. If the season ended today, the Twins would be sitting at home watching.

Most Twins fans who have weighed in, Midwesterners to a fault, say that they're rooting for Boston to beat the White Sox in their upcoming series, all the better to give the Twins the best chance to win the divisional race. But consider two things:

1. The Twins have already completed their season series with the Red Sox, and have no further influence on how well or how poorly they play down the stretch. The Twins do have games remaining against the White Sox, at home, so any deficit smaller than three games can conceivably be made up in that series.

2. If the goal is simply to win the division title, then by all means go for it. After all, the Twins did win the title on the last day of the season in 2006, then bowed meekly out of the playoffs against the Oakland A's. If, however, the goal is to get as far into the playoffs as possible, and possibly even win a World Series, then what you really want is to clinch a playoff berth as soon as possible so that you can adjust your pitching rotation, give mildly injured regulars some time to mend, etc.

Barring utter collapse by the Rays, the Twins' best shot for post-season success is to clinch some kind of playoff berth during that three-game series with the White Sox. The easiest way to do that is for the Twins to not only win those games, but be ahead of the Red Sox as they do so, and the best way to begin that process (IMO, anyway) is for the Red Sox to start losing early and often, beginning with Chicago. The Twins can make up those games -- Boston, which has the toughest schedule of the playoff contenders, can't.

Follow-up:
Another Twins fan on the blogosphere rants as if he's watching the NFL; dude, before you go off on that kind of tirade, it might help to check out the many examples of divisional and even World Series champions who lost close games in the late season because of bullpen or fielding failures. (And that's just in the last three seasons - 2004 through 2007.)

As for his argument that 'playoff teams do not blow four games in a week', I'll point out that the 2007 Cubs lost four games in a week in September and not only still won the NL Central but lost no ground doing it. The 2007 Diamondbacks lost four in a week in September (and 5 of their last 7) and still won the NL West despite a Colorado team that won 14 of their last 15. The 2007 Phillies lost five in a week in September while allowing the Mets to move from up 3 to up 6 and still caught them to win the NL East. The 2007 Red Sox lost four in a row in September and still held off the Yankees to win the AL East.

So this thing he says that playoff teams don't do? Every team that won their division by two games or less last year did it, and did it later in the season than the Twins did.

There's a word for this kind of thing: baseball.