Having been witness at Yankee Stadium to said 11-1 blowout, I can attest to the fact that wild card or no wild card, every Boston-New York game (regular season and postseason) for the past eight years has been fraught with anticipation and tension and has usually delivered copious amounts of quality baseball. Even the most confident Yankee fan could not have predicted Pedro would surrender eight earned runs in five-plus innings.<p>It is interesting that, as Harvey Araton points out in Sunday's *Times,* Costas was once against even a single wild card. Now he favors two wild cards in each league, albeit because he wants to redress the imbalance the presence of a single wild card creates. <p>But would baseball stop with two wild cards in each league? I'm not being facetious. That's a slippery slope. Could we one day see four or six wild cards per league? Then baseball would become hockey, where every team makes the playoffs and the regular season means absolutely nothing.<p>[ September 20, 2004: Message edited by: wordygurdy ]</p>
|