Baseball's Wacky Wild-Card Gimmick

But is there any comfort to be found?

Man is in love and loves what vanishes,

What more is there to say?

-- Yeats, Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen

Just three weeks to go, and another fabled American institution will enter that Valhalla of cultural symbols, the citadel of nostalgic memory. From the Pan Am Building in New York City to the final episode of Cheers, the familiar moorings that give meaning to everyday life become unhinged. So it is with the greatest protracted emotional spectacle in sports: the nail-biting tension of September baseball pennant races.

At the end of last week, three teams in the American League's Eastern Division (the defending-champion Toronto Blue Jays, the rejuvenated New York Yankees and the stretch-running Baltimore Orioles) were separated by less than two games. In the National League's Western Division, the San Francisco Giants had seen their 10-game lead over the pitcher-perfect Atlanta Braves evaporate completely. The Chicago White Sox seemed headed for a division crown in the American League West, but the trailing Texas Rangers still dreamed that Nolan Ryan's farewell tour would climax in the World Series. Only the Philadelphia Phillies -- the 1990s' answer to the bawdy, brawling Gashouse Gang -- appeared certain of postseason play.

This is baseball the way it ought to be. Nightly sellouts in Toronto and Baltimore; electrifying performances like Jim Abbott's Labor Day weekend no- hitter at Yankee Stadium; devoted fans, dispensing with such frivolities as sleep to catch late-night-TV games from the West Coast; mornings reserved for poring over box scores and analyzing the pitching lines for the crucial upcoming games. The daily drama of the pennant race flows inexorably from its underlying zero-sum logic: a ball club either beats all comers in its seven- team division or sadly packs its equipment bags at the end of the regular season.

No more. In a misguided business decision that may be remembered as the sporting world's answer to the 1985 roll-out of the new Coke, the major-league owners voted last week, 27-1, to cheapen, if not destroy, all future September pennant races. Beginning next year, both the American and the National leagues will be divided into three -- rather than the existing two -- divisions. To create an additional, ersatz round of league play-offs as an offering unto the Gods of Television (ABC and NBC, who will split the postseason telecasts), the owners agreed to let losers stumble into the postseason. Wild-card teams (an affront to purity invented in 1978 by the military-industrial complex that is pro football) will now contaminate baseball. Beginning in 1994, the also-ran team with the best record in each league will be invited to join the play- offs.