Oh! What a Night!

As the title would suggest, let's start off with a link to a particular song by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.

And, with that in mind, what a night it was for many a baseball fan, as the Baltimore Orioles came from behind in the ninth inning to defeat the Boston Red Sox, who were then knocked out of the playoffs moments later when the Tampa Bay Rays defeated the New York Yankees in extra innings, after coming back from a 7-0 deficit and tying the game with a 2-out, 2-strike solo home run by Dan Johnson in the bottom of the ninth inning. Meanwhile, the Atlanta Braves lost by one run in extra innings to the Philadelphia Phillies and thereby also lost out on the playoffs, finishing one game behind the St. Louis Cardinals, who won handily over the Houston Astros. For Boston and Atlanta, these capped off incredible collapses in the month of September. For St. Louis and Tampa Bay, this was the culmination of a month of climbing back into competition.

Still, this occurs amid conversation of expanding Major League Baseball's playoff structure, and that very prospect led a friend of mine to post the following:

Dear, Bud Selig.
Don't screw up the playoffs (See this season).
Signed, baseball fans

And, indeed, if the Major League Baseball playoffs worked like the NBA or NHL, where eight teams from each league made it to the playoffs, all four of the teams above would not have been playing to continue their seasons today. Rather, they would have been playing for home field advantage in the first round of the playoffs, while the bigger stories today might have been Cleveland losing but still holding off the Chicago White Sox to take the American League's eighth seed by one game and Cincinnati perhaps playing with a different game plan today as they fought to try to catch the Washington Nationals for the National League's eighth seed. Certainly, these could have still be dramatic stories, but perhaps they would have had a different meaning than the races do right now.

Still, as a potentially interesting exercise, I looked at what the first-round matchups would be if Major League Baseball followed that model. They would be:

American League:

Cleveland at New York
Toronto at Texas
Los Angeles at Detroit
Boston at Tampa Bay

National League:

Washington at Philadelphia
Los Angeles at Milwaukee
San Francisco at Arizona
Atlanta at St. Louis

Some interesting stories, perhaps, including the Nationals making the playoffs and some potentially exciting first-round matchups there. What do you think?