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MLB Wildcards

By Wikipedia

For over a decade Major League Baseball has awarded the highest finisher among non-division winners a "wildcard" spot in the postseason. The move was designed to increase revenues both by increasing interest among fans in cities that would otherwise has no chance of making the postseason as well as the extra round of TV playoff games. Baseball purists saw it as yet another desecration of the National Pastime by the Selig regime.

Since 1995 (it was to have taken effect in 1994 but the playoffs that season were cancelled by a strike), the wild card team must surrender the home field advantage in the Division Series (ALDS and NLDS) and the League Championship Series (ALCS and NLCS). Regardless, however, of how the League Champion team reaches the World Series, the home field advantage for the World Series has been determined beforehand (prior to 2003, on an alternating schedule; in 2003 and 2004 the home field advantage was determined by the winner of the All-Star Game). A controversy resulted in 1997 when the Florida Marlins, who won the National League pennant after qualifying for the playoffs as a wild card, had home-field advantage over the AL champion Cleveland Indians, who had won their division, in that year's World Series, which the Marlins won in seven games, winning the seventh and deciding game at home (this same scenario was repeated in 2004 when the wild-card Boston Red Sox had home-field advantage over the St. Louis Cardinals, a first-place team, and defeated the Cardinals in four games). Both of the teams that reached the 2002 World Series were wild card teams: The Anaheim Angels from the AL and the San Francisco Giants from the NL. The Angels won the series in seven games. Indeed, wild-card teams won three consecutive World Series from 2002 through 2004, as the 2003 champion, the Florida Marlins, was also a wild card.

The wild card team (which can be considered the fourth seed in an analogy to other sports' tournaments) usually plays the team with the best record in the league (which can be considered the first seed) in the Division Series. However, an MLB rule states that teams from the same division cannot face each other in the Division Series. Therefore, if the wild card team is from the same division as the team with the best record, then the wild card team will play the second-best team in the league, while the team with the best record will play against the third-best team. This was borne out in the 2005 NLDS, for example, when the division winners in the National League were (in order from best to worst regular season record) the St. Louis Cardinals, the Atlanta Braves, and the San Diego Padres, and the Houston Astros were the wild card team. Normally, the Astros would have opened their Division Series against the Cardinals while the Padres would have faced the Braves; however, the Astros and Cardinals are both in the National League Central Division, so the Astros faced the Braves while the Padres faced the Cardinals.