Everything went right for the Yankees Monday night. They beat the Royals 8-1, getting another good start from Michael Pineda, and knocking around James Shields. In addition, all the teams competing with them for the second AL Wild Card slot lost.
The Yankees are six games behind the Orioles with eight games to play against Baltimore.
In addition, Oakland won and LAnaheim lost, bring the two teams back into a tie for the AL West lead. This is setting up a very interesting end to the season, in which these two teams are fighting to the end for the AL West title and best record in the AL, which would confer home field advantage throughout the playoffs. Whatever team wins the second wild card slot might actually go into the WC game in better shape than either of these AL West division title contenders. It’s quite possible that the team winning the first WC slot has to compete in a playoff game the day before. Suddenly, one of the best teams in baseball will play a team far behind in the standings with a possibly depleted bullpen, and maybe without their best starter. If that happens and they lose, I can see the Angels or Athletics suddenly not too happy with a second wild card.
If MLB is so determined to get ten out of thirty teams into the playoffs, a more elegant solution to the second wildcard would have been for the teams in each league with the best five records qualify, and then play in a round robin tournament, similar to the first phase of the World Cup, with the top two teams going to the LCS. The division winners would get home field advantage. Alternately you could just split the leagues into five three team divisions and have the first round round robin, the divisions would cover smaller parts of the country and be more meaningful to fans than at present, though you would increase the chances of a team with a losing record winning the division.