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Musical Chairs

In keeping with the utter lack of practicality in these proposals, I'd like to do away with the playoffs entirely.

Used to be, when I was a lad, in addition to walking to school uphill all three ways, I used to watch all 8 teams (and later all 10) in each league compete for one playoff spot--each league's winner would then meet in the World Series. Typically, that system resulted in boring the fans of at least half-a-dozen teams in each league by August 1st. Any team more than 10 games behind with less than sixty games to go could forget about the pennant, so two-thirds of all fans would have no real reason to follow their teams beyond late July, other than blind loyalty, complacence, and cluelessness. (As a clueless lad, I rooted for the early Mets right up to the final out of their mathematical elimination--and doublechecked the math to make sure they were really out of the race, which, of course, they were never really in to begin with.) So, after enough expansion had taken place to fill the Hindenberg, and after the10-team leagues were carved up into 5-team divisions, and then after the Wild Card was created, the possibility of post-season play was given to maybe half the teams in the league for August and parts of September, extending the point of hopelessness for most fans by six or seven weeks, which has been exciting.

So why do I propose doing away with the wildly successful and exciting playoffs and the Wild Card? Do I hate baseball that much?

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