
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.
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