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I think this is one of the worst moves that MLB could make. First, adding a second Wild Card team to the play-offs just increases the NHLization of the MLN play-offs. What’s next, 8 teams per league making the post-season? The baseball regular season is supposed to mean something.

But making things even worse is the one-game play-off between the two Wild Card teams. That is just beyond idiotic. Perhaps the biggest complaint about the current post-season is that the Division Series is best-of-5 instead of best-of-7, making luck a bigger factor. Well, a one-game play-off is an absolute crapshoot. And while one-game play-offs have been used in baseball for decades (in the AL since at least 1948), they had heretofore been an additional regular-season game between two teams that had finished the regular schedule with identical records, so one-game play-offs were used in baseball in situations in which other sports wouldn’t even play a game and decide things through some sort of tiebreaker (such as head-to-head record or, in extreme cases, a coin flip). But here the one-game “tiebreaker” will be played by teams that didn’t finish the season with the same record; in fact, it could be played by a team with 100 wins versus a team with 89 wins. Some “tie”!

Remember those incredible last few days of the season last year, with the Cardinals and Rays mounting furious comebacks and the Braves and Red Sox collapsing,culminating in that otherwordly final day in which the Cardinals and Rays won and the Braves and Red Sox lost (with 3 of the games being absolute nailbiters) to cap two incredible reversals of fortune? Well, if the new rules had been in effect last year, all four teams would have been guaranteed a trip to a one-game play-off with around 4 games to go and would have been resting regulars and setting up their post-season pitching rotation. All excitement would be gone.

The Wild Card’s introduction in 1994 eliminated the possibility of a great pennant race between two outstanding teams in which the winner made the play-offs and the loser went home—the last real pennant race between great teams was the 1993 NL West race between the Braves and the Giants, where the Braves mounted a late-season comeback and won the final game of the regular season to finish with 104 wins, and the Giants lost the final game to finish with 103 games and fail to make the post-season. With the Wild Card, the loser would always have something to fall back upon, and what could have been classic pennant races between the Red Sox and Yankees became afterthoughts, since both teams would make the play-offs irrespective of who won. Now we won’t even have good Wild Card races.

Baseball should not be about giving losing teams consolation prizes.

As for moving the Astros to the AL West, I think it’s a slap of the face to tradition, and there now will be two Central Time Zone teams playing in the same division with three Pacific Time Zone teams, making game times inconvenient for one set of fans. And there will now be interleague games all year long, making such games less “special.” I don’t have a problem with that aspect of it if having each league have three divisions of five teams each means that we go back to the pre-1994 schedules in which teams within a division played the same exact schedule (instead of one team in a division getting to play the Orioles 6 times and the Yankees none while the other has the opposite schedule), but I doubt that MLB will even take that into account.