It doesn’t get a whole lot better than that. Roy Halladay versus Chris Carpenter in a dramatic game that was 1-0 almost the entire way. It was enough to make one wish there was a Game 6 between the Cardinals and Phillies and maybe even a Game 7 on the way.
But there isn’t, and it really makes no sense at all.
A seven-game series doesn’t give a definitive answer to which baseball team is better, but it’s quite a bit more likely to give an accurate result than a five-game series.
Which is why seven-game series were the norm for baseball throughout most of its history, at least up until Bud Selig introduced us to the wild card.
And it should be seven-gamers all of the way. It’s not like these wild card series are between teams of wildly different qualities. This isn’t the NBA. In baseball, all eight teams that advance to the postseason in a given year have a legitimate chance of becoming the World Series champs. And all eight should be allowed to put their best feet forward by starting off with a seven-game series.
If that means the postseason has to end two days later, well, I can live with that.
