Baseball Wild Cards Should Lift Our Spirits

Somewhere in America this weekend, a Yankees fan and a Red Sox fan are refusing to speak to each other. In Cleveland, a city that had written off baseball in July is checking the standings twice a day. In Chicago, White Sox fans are watching a 15-game lead dissolve like sugar in rain and wondering what they did to deserve this.

They should all, in their misery, count their blessings. This is the best September in years.

Four genuine pennant races are still breathing. Boston and New York are a half-game apart in the East, headed for a last-weekend series at Fenway that looks more and more like a playoff of its own. Oakland and the Angels are dead even in the West. Houston is trying to hold off Philadelphia and Florida for a wild card nobody will concede. And Cleveland — Cleveland, which lost 93 games two years ago — leads the wild card outright.

The wild card gets blamed for many things, but give it this: it has kept September alive in a dozen cities that used to be playing out the string by Labor Day. Baseball's expanded postseason is a compromise with purity, and like most compromises, it produces something better than either extreme — a pennant race and a safety net at once.

The joy of it is the math. Fans who could not tell you the federal budget can recite magic numbers. Children who have never seen a box score know that the Yankees have three left at Fenway. For two weeks, the whole sport is a common arithmetic.

There are casualties. White Sox fans are learning that a 15-game lead is a rumor, not a result. Padres fans are learning they might back into the playoffs below .500 and are fine with it, thanks. This is as it should be. Pennant races are not supposed to be comfortable.

So root for the collapse, the surge, the rainout doubleheader and the half-game swing. October will come soon enough. September, this year, is the show.