The great thing about Major League Baseball is that it's not easy to qualify for the postseason.
While half the teams make the playoffs in the NBA and NHL, and nearly half qualify in the NFL, baseball has always been the toughest, which in turn, makes a postseason appearance alone a meaningful thing.
Think about it. The Texas Rangers hadn't made the playoffs since 1999 before qualifying last season and going all the way to the World Series. It galvanized the city and gave this town "Red Fever", so to speak.
Now, MLB commissioner Bud Selig is toying with the idea of expanding the MLB postseason by two additional teams.
Surprisingly, with all the "baseball purists" out there, the idea doesn't seem to be drawing really any criticism.
The idea is that there would be two additional Wild Card teams to make four along with the six division winners, giving us 10 teams in the playoffs instead of just eight.
Selig has said there is no format in mind to accomodate the extra teams, but here's what would make sense the most.
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In the interest of keeping the season from going into November, which has also been brought up, the two wild card teams in each league would play each other in a one-game, winner-take-all game, similar to the NCAA Tournament's "play-in" games, while the six division winners would start play in the "second round", which was super confusing in the new NCAA Tournament format this March.
The winners of those wild card matchups would play the No. 1 seed in each league, and the Nos. 2 and 3 seeds would play each other, with the same divisional foe rules in place where teams from the same division can't play each other in the first -- or "second" -- round.
So, are you for it? Or against it?
