‘October Madness’ is great … even better if including Brewers and Cardinals

By John Burbridge sports@charlescitypress.com

Most of us have been advised to “Be careful what you wish for” … or even “Be careful what you praise”.

I took no heed when touting the proposal and approval of Major League Baseball’s still relatively new wild-card playoff format which essentially invokes NCAA Basketball Tournament-like “October Madness”.

For those living off the grid in places like Papua New Guinea, or have long since given up on baseball, or have never paid much attention to the sport anyway, in 2012 MLB added another wild-card team for both leagues for a total of four. The wild-card teams play each other in one-game playoffs with the winners advancing to best-of-five series against the top seeds of their respective leagues.

I considered the change in format then, as I still do now, as one of the most brilliant ideas since someone decided to fit a pizza within a deep dish.

One of the more common complaints about baseball is that there are too many meaningless games during the regular season. And there are even newer complaints now that by expanding the postseason field to 10 from 8 will make playoff berths less glorious.

But the new format gives baseball fans — and there are still some holdouts out there — more reason to take an active interest throughout the regular season.

Take the American League East. Under the old format, New York Yankees fans would likely not be too concerned about catching the Boston Red Sox when their team still had a chance but rather just kept a casual eye in the rearview mirror for any team that might be sneaking up to challenge for the single wild-card spot.

Now, division championships mean more. No playoff-caliber team wants to put itself in a position where its postseason can be a one-and-done affair.

Going into the final week of the regular season, the National League Central has three teams projected to play in October — Cubs, Brewers and Cardinals. As of typing of this column, the Cubs are 2 ½ games ahead of the Brewers and 4 ½ up from the Cardinals. With the Brewers and Cardinals currently engaged in a three-game series, and the Cubs due to host the Cardinals in a regular-season-ending three-game series this weekend, the division title will likely go down to the wire.

As a Cubs fan, I would love to avoid “October Madness” and leave that to the Brewers and the Cardinals — or the Rockies if they move up or the Dodgers if they move down. Still — and again in the spirit of being careful of what to wish for or not to wish for — wild card-game winners tend to take on the momentum that comes with having just advanced past an elimination game. In 2014, the San Francisco survived a 1-0 wild card-game thriller against the Pittsburgh Pirates and eventually won the World Series.

There are plenty of hard-nosed, old-school sport fans and cynical journalists who continually scoff whenever established sport leagues and associations make tweaks and changes to the order of things. But sometimes these leagues and associations get it right, and the MLB’s wild-card game is one of these examples.

Another example is the National Football League’s crackdown on late and dangerous hits.

Some don’t see the logic … especially Green Bay Packers fans feeling that Clay Matthews has been unfairly called for roughing the passer in three straight games. The last two calls were arguably factors in the Packers’ losses, and the first one helped keep an unsuccessful final drive alive for the Bears in the season-opener.

But if you ever viewed the highlights from the Pittsburgh Steelers’ “Steel Curtain” and the Chicago Bears’ “46 Defense”, you can see that the game has since become far more safety conscious. The Clay Matthews hits may be borderline, but the footage from the so-called “when football was football” era often displays malicious intent never subject to penalties or fines.

If you’re a glutton for violence, Google “Wilbur Marshall-Joe Ferguson” and watch what first appears to be gridiron manslaughter. And there was no flag thrown.

Old school fans have also voiced discontent over the National Basketball Association starting its regular season two weeks earlier from what had been the traditional Halloween opening night. The reason for the earlier start is to spread out the schedule to save teams from playing three games in four days.

Come on! They’re already pampered multi-millionaire athletes!

Yet this is another good responsible move from a sport league. Playing a less-condensed schedule will alleviate back-to-back-to-back air travel. If you’re nursing a swollen ankle or a wrenched lower back, travelling repeatedly at an altitude of 35,000 feet is likely not going to be the cure.

And then there’s the College Football Playoffs which finally adopted a four-team playoffs — a “Finally Four” — in determining a national champion. That’s another sensible adjustment that often gets criticized.

Sure, maybe we can increase that bracket to eight teams. And as before when we had about two or three teams complaining about being snubbed from playing in the national championship game, now we have nine or 10 or even more sniveling about not being included in the “Finally Four”.

Progress will always have its share of detractors, but given a chance wisdom can prevail.