A Thot

My Mets-fan friend, a serious baseball purist (he wants all baseball records from 1988 to today stamped with a 'steriods' asterisk), brought up something to me that's probably already been talked to death, but that I thought had legitimacy.

Right now there are 5 NL teams with win-loss records better than or equal to the San Diego Padres who have little or no chance of making the postseason, while San Diego is pretty close to being a shoe-in.

This is true obviously because the Padres are the leaders in the NL West, which is a supposedly 'weaker' division.

But the fact that San Diego plays the majority of their games against these so-called 'weaker' opponents and still can only muster a .500 record makes their playoff status sound even more like a joke.

Is that right? Is that fair?

It doesn't matter - it's the way baseball is right now. The Powers That Be love the divisional setup, the unbalanced schedules, and the supposedly 'natural' rivalries.

Which means one possible way to let fairness matter will likely never be considered - that is, abandon the divisions, or make all the teams in a league one whole division, and let the 4 teams with the best win-loss records in each league go to the playoffs.

Say, what about the excitement the the Wild Card races? Well, what would the difference be between a race for the Wild Card and a race for Fourth Place? I'll tell you - the race for 4th place would probably be just as exciting, with the sure benefit of having the teams with the best records playing in the postseason.

This may sound like sour grapes, as if baseball should reorganize itself just because of my desire to make the Marlins' misfortunes this year less daunting. But remember, if everything suddenly magically transformed to the way I'm proposing right now, the Fish would still be 3 games out of the playoffs with 7 games to go, which wouldn't really be that much of a help.

And it was my Mets-fan friend who wants this, and the Mets are even farther back.