Baseball's Wacky Wild-Card Gimmick

By WALTER SHAPIRO

But is there any comfort to be found?

Man is in love and loves what vanishes,

What more is there to say?

-- Yeats, Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen

Just three weeks to go, and another fabled American institution will enter that Valhalla of cultural symbols, the citadel of nostalgic memory. From the Pan Am Building in New York City to the final episode of Cheers, the familiar moorings that give meaning to everyday life become unhinged. So it is with the greatest protracted emotional spectacle in sports: the nail-biting tension of September baseball pennant races.

At the end of last week, three teams in the American League's Eastern Division (the defending-champion Toronto Blue Jays, the rejuvenated New York Yankees and the stretch-running Baltimore Orioles) were separated by less than two games. In the National League's Western Division, the San Francisco Giants had seen their 10-game lead over the pitcher-perfect Atlanta Braves evaporate completely. The Chicago White Sox seemed headed for a division crown in the American League West, but the trailing Texas Rangers still dreamed that Nolan Ryan's farewell tour would climax in the World Series. Only the Philadelphia Phillies -- the 1990s' answer to the bawdy, brawling Gashouse Gang -- appeared certain of postseason play.

This is baseball the way it ought to be. Nightly sellouts in Toronto and Baltimore; electrifying performances like Jim Abbott's Labor Day weekend no- hitter at Yankee Stadium; devoted fans, dispensing with such frivolities as sleep to catch late-night-TV games from the West Coast; mornings reserved for poring over box scores and analyzing the pitching lines for the crucial upcoming games. The daily drama of the pennant race flows inexorably from its underlying zero-sum logic: a ball club either beats all comers in its seven- team division or sadly packs its equipment bags at the end of the regular season.

No more. In a misguided business decision that may be remembered as the sporting world's answer to the 1985 roll-out of the new Coke, the major-league owners voted last week, 27-1, to cheapen, if not destroy, all future September pennant races. Beginning next year, both the American and the National leagues will be divided into three -- rather than the existing two -- divisions. To create an additional, ersatz round of league play-offs as an offering unto the Gods of Television (ABC and NBC, who will split the postseason telecasts), the owners agreed to let losers stumble into the postseason. Wild-card teams (an affront to purity invented in 1978 by the military-industrial complex that is pro football) will now contaminate baseball. Beginning in 1994, the also-ran team with the best record in each league will be invited to join the play- offs.

Sad as it seems, it could have been worse. Among the owners, only George Bush Jr. of the Texas Rangers -- displaying the kind of fidelity to principle that might have kept his father in the White House -- opposed the new best-of- five-games round of play-offs. The Major League Players Association had balked at an earlier proposal to have two wild-card teams in each league compete with the winners of the two existing divisions. The three-division plan represents an awkward compromise. Granted, three divisions in each league will finally bring geographic logic to baseball: no longer will schoolchildren grow up believing that St. Louis is really in the East and Atlanta in the West. But reconfiguring the two 14-team leagues into three divisions each is also inherently unfair: there will be only four, not five, teams in the Western outposts of both leagues.

This, then, is the world of unintended consequences. Hailed by the owners as a double-the-winners, double-the-fun gimmick, realignment would give this September's pennant-race plot line all the drama of a ratings war between Arsenio Hall and Chevy Chase. Nix the three-way scramble among the Blue Jays, Yankees and Orioles: the second-place team, based on current records, would be the American League wild card. Forget the monthlong showdown between the Giants and the surging Braves -- San Francisco and Atlanta would be running away with their respective divisions. The details of National League realignment are still up in the air, but if Atlanta were in the new Central Division, all the N.L. division races would already be wrapped up, save for a yawn-inducing battle of mediocrities (Montreal, Houston and St. Louis) for the Miss Congeniality wild-card slot.

Baseball, to be sure, is like the nation that created it: too resilient to be counted out no matter how dire the forecasts. If the game can survive cartoonish owners (George Steinbrenner, Marge Schott), self-indulgent players (the entire New York Mets roster), 19th century labor relations and a defrocked commissioner (the job has been vacant since Fay Vincent was forced out a year ago), perhaps this latest wild-card wackiness will prove to be little more than an unfortunate rain delay. But don't wait till next year; this may be our last and best September.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME chart by Peter C.T. Elsworth

CAPTION: PLAY (MORE) BALL!

How the realignment will shape up