Bud Selig, the man behind baseball's new playoff system.

There are tweaks, there are changes, and then there are full-blown re-dos.  Baseball’s latest series of changes covers pretty much all those categories, and said changes will affect every team in baseball to some extent.  No team will be affected more than the Houston Astros.  In 2013, the Houston Astros will move from the National League to the American League, ending 51 years of NL ball for the Houston ball club.

Houston agreed to the move as part of owner Drayton McLane’s sale of the club to Jim Crane for $680 million dollars.  The move from the NL to the AL will give baseball two 15-team leagues, which means that baseball’s other changes will make more sense.  With the even divisions, this means baseball will scrap the current interleague play format and go to a full-time interleague schedule in which a team’s interleague games will occur throughout the season, not just around the All-Star Game and during the World Series.  I guess that makes the devaluation of the AL and NL complete (save for the designated hitter rule, which will continue to be an AL quirk).

One more change:  Major League Baseball will be adding a second wild card team to the playoffs, creating a preliminary round of the playoffs in which the two wild card clubs will play one another, with the winner going on to play the three division winners in the first round of the real playoffs.  This gives division winners a reward for winning their division and makes the wild card a bit less desirable.  It means those late-season swoons will have less impact, and hopefully bad wild card teams still get sent home without much fanfare.

Tags: Houston Astros, MLB, baseball, Major League Baseball, National League, American League, baseball to change playoffs, baseball adds second wild card team to playoffs, baseball adjusts American and National Leagues, interleague play to become permanent, baseball to switch to two 15-team leagues, Drayton McLane, Jim Crane, Astros sold for 0 million, baseball to make interleague play a full-season affair

I’ve never had a problem eating food from a gas station.  Just two weeks ago, I ate a couple of hot dogs purchased from a gas station.  They were delicious.  That’s not the first time I’ve eaten gas station food, and I doubt it will be the last.  There’s nothing like a fun food novelty. […]

Commissioner Roger Goodell gathered 32 NFL owners for one big question.  One of the league’s most wanderlust-stricken franchises is looking to move again.  The Oakland-Los Angeles-Oakland Raiders, tired of gutting it out in a run-down stadium, were once again looking for greener pastures.  Only the Miami Dolphins refused to cooperate.  With a vote of 31-1, […]

In 2006, an injury to Dallas Cowboys starting quarterback Drew Bledsoe opened the door for an undrafted free agent by the name of Tony Romo to take the helm of America’s Team and lead the Dallas Cowboys to an early playoff exit.  Bledsoe went from starter to afterthought in a season.  Now, the circle continues […]

For 89 years, Oscars has never had a major mistake.  The last few Oscars might have had a few flubs, but at least they never got the most important category of the night wrong.  Well, that’s now changed, all thanks to OG Bonnie and Clyde legends Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.  When Faye Dunaway called […]

Tom Brady has been wildly successful, if controversial.  He’s the first quarterback ever to win five Super Bowls and only the second player to do so after Charles Haley.  Unlike Haley, Brady won all his Super Bowls with the same team, the New England Patriots.  The only thing that seems to be able to stop […]

Ben Affleck, no matter what you might think of him, is a talented actor and director.  He’s got the goods, but he’s smart enough to know when he’s in over his head.  All along, since he took on the mantle of Batman, he’s had his eyes on writing, directing, and starring as the Caped Crusader. […]

In May, students for the for-profit American College of Education were running into some problems.  Their access to email accounts and course information was locked down by Google, who had disabled their accounts.  The reason why?  A fired IT worker for the American College of Education locked the school out of their Google cloud account. […]