MLB to Expand Playoffs, Add Wild-Card Teams

With a new Collective Bargaining Agreement ready to be announced early next week, Major League Baseball is set to experience a few significant changes.  One of those involves baseball’s drafting process.  The other impacts both regular and postseason play.  MLB has announced its plans on expanding their current playoff format by including an extra wild-card team from the American and National Leagues.  This expanded postseason format could be implemented as soon as the 2012 season.

This September, as MLB was preparing for its upcoming labor talks, it was announced that the league and its Players Association were closing in on a new CBA.  While several things have had to have been ironed out since then, one thing that was reportedly agreed upon at that point was playoff expansion.

The reason it has taken as long as it has for playoff expansion to become official is because the new postseason format was tied to the Houston Astros and their move to the American League.  With the Astros joining the AL, there will now be six divisions in baseball which each contain five teams.  The AL and NL will each contain 15 teams when the division swap takes place in 2013.

While Houston’s situation will take two seasons to go into effect, MLB’s commissioner Bud Selig told reporters that baseball’s playoff expansion could be implemented as early as 2012.  Selig noted that both sides are “still working on” the wild-card situation, but that they “hope to have it for next year”.

The big idea behind expansion and the introduction of an additional wild-card team from each league is to reward clubs who finish the season with the major’s best records.  MLB and the Players Association agree that teams that are able to clinch wild-card berths should have a more difficult road to the World Series than do division winners.

To make things tougher for the wild-card winners, the league will implement a one-game playoff.  During this do-or-die contest, the two wild-card clinchers from each league will be pitted against each other for the right to move on to the division series.