Interleague Play Dooms October
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

There are two basic arguments against the wild card. The first is that it cheapens division races and ultimately the World Series by allowing teams that don’t even finish in first place into the postseason. The second is that the unbalanced schedule makes it possible – likely, in some circumstances – for the wild-card winner not even to be the best second-place team in the league, but the one with the worst competition.
Looking toward the stretch run, the second of these concerns is looming pretty large.
The strange nature of the National League East this year, in which every team looks likely to finish above .500, has led to a historically strange wild-card chase, which is taking on the character of a classic divisional race to the wire. Of the five teams with a real shot at the NL wild card, four are in the East, and they’re going to spend most of September playing one another. The fifth is the Astros, and with a markedly easier schedule than their rivals, they have to be considered the team to beat right now.
Of Houston’s 29 remaining games, just 12 are against .500 teams – it has five with St. Louis, four with Florida, and three with Philadelphia. The rest of its games are against Chicago, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh.
Contrast that with, say, Florida’s remaining schedule. The Marlins will be playing seven games against Washington, six each against Atlanta, Philadelphia, and New York, four against Houston, and three against St. Louis. That’s a brutal stretch – even if they play their best ball of the season over the next month, they’re going to have to hope that the Nationals collapse and that the Braves and Cardinals begin resting all their regulars in preparation for October.
Each of the other teams in the East has a soft spot in its schedule. The Mets finish up with four games at home against the woeful Rockies, the Nationals have a six-game stretch against San Diego and San Francisco, and the Phillies have a three-game set with the Reds. For the most part, though, they’ll all be playing one another, the Braves, and the Cardinals, and while all of them are capable of winning the wild card, they’re going to need as much luck as talent to do it.
If this seems wrong, that’s because it is wrong. The weaknesses in the wild card and the unbalanced schedule are coming together this year in a kind of perfect storm, one in which Roger Clemens, Dontrelle Willis, Pedro Martinez, Jose Guillen, and Bobby Abreu have less influence over the pennant race than scheduling quirks. At the root of it all, of course, is interleague play.
The schedule, after all, was fundamentally unbalanced by the absurdities of interleague play. In a balanced schedule, all teams in the league are supposed to play the same schedule; interleague play made a hash of that. As is frequently pointed out, it’s simply not fair that the Mets play the Yankees six times a year while the Marlins play the Devil Rays as many times. The unbalanced schedule was supposed to go some way toward compensating for that by providing many more intradivisional matchups, which in theory should provide more exciting stretch runs. While that’s a laudable aim, in a year like this one, in which one division is particularly strong while the others are particularly weak, it opens the door for several teams to beat one another’s brains in while an inferior team sneaks past and grabs a ticket to October.
Solving the problem couldn’t be easier. Baseball simply has to give up interleague play, which has, anyway, reached a point where no one considers it particularly special. The absurdity of a system where the Mets play the Yankees as many times as they do the Cubs or Dodgers, and where the world is expected to suffer through an entire September during which the collective membership of the ridiculous NL West feebly strive to be the team with the least-bad record, is becoming more and more aesthetically offensive. As the Astros’ schedule shows, it’s also reaching a point where it’s threatening the integrity of the pennant race, thus undermining the playoffs and ultimately the World Championship – which is what the game is supposed to be about.
I don’t expect the lords of baseball to do anything about this problem; they’ve cast their vote, and it’s with those Rockies-Mariners games in June. What I do expect is that the long, slow erosion of the prestige of the pennant race will eventually come back to haunt MLB in the form of ever-diminishing audiences for the playoffs that are supposed to represent baseball at its best.