LogansDad said:
If anything the wild card games have made fans of teams that would otherwise be out of their division races continue to tune in. I'm not sure how eliminating those is a good thing for ratings.
 
Because baseball fails when you have that attitude. That wasn't the case when baseball was our national pastime. Baseball works best, like soccer, when you measure teams over the course of the entire season.
In soccer in England, the FA Cup is a fun diversion. Top teams even use their B lineups if an important league game is coming up. The season is the focus, and you enjoy seeing good teams play.
Baseball is the ultimate marathon sport. I know it seems like a paradox, but adding the wild card actually reduced local interest because it helped teach younger fans that the goal was to reach the playoffs, so if you're out, you stop watching. Less teams may be out of the playoffs now, but those who are tune out completely.
How can you have a situation where a local broadcast gets 1,000 viewers?
People say ratings died with the strike. But fans came back in '95. And they saw the wild card in action. An average of 29.0 million watched that World Series. Then 25.2 million the next year. And by 2000, with that inane Subway Series, they were down to a record-low (at the time) 18.1 million. They added another set of wild cards in 2012, and, lo-and-behold, another record low of 12.7 million viewers. This year will probably break that record.
But what about the Super Bowl? Super Bowl XXIX, in '95, drew 83.4 million viewers. Super Bowl XLVIII, this past February, drew a record 111.5 million. Last week, baseball threw the last game of the NLCS up against Thursday Night Football. Both scored a 1.2 in the 18-49 demo... on cable channels (NFL Network also runs the game). CBS scored a 5.4. This with a piddly little regular season NFL game (it was Jets/Patriots).
OK, I'm overselling football's gain and baseball's decline, but you can't look at these systems as deserving of the same approach. When two .550 teams play each other, even a seven-game series is like rolling dice. And we can pretend that baseball teams can be built for the playoffs, but what does that really mean? One pitch from a dominant starter and you've changed that equation. Because when bats hit balls, good wins out over mediocre more often than mediocre wins out over mediocre, but it takes about 20-30 games to begin to establish that.
Bottom line: baseball is trying to sell something that the NFL can sell and it can't. Baseball has to return to what made it great. And that has nothing to do with wild cards.