2012 Wild Card Playoff Predictions: One game is fucking stupid

Well, four major league teams have finished playing 162 games which involved countless series of three or four games over the past six months, and now it comes down to one game. Yep, sort of flies in the face of everything that baseball's about (Rotation depth? Whatever ...), but Bud Selig was so pleased with last year's thrilling finish to the regular season that he decided (NOTE: According to Ken Rosenthal, I stand corrected; Selig actually wanted the much better best-of-three format, but the 14 members of his Special Committee for On-Field Matters unanimously shot him down) to forcefully recreate it this year by adding one more team for each league in this year's playoffs with an idea that's bound to backfire in some future season. What happens when there's a tie for a division title or playoff spot, and a team has blown through its first two starters before a Division Series has even started?

For the time being, Selig looks fairly smart. Fans in many cities got to hold out a little more hope for a little longer than usual as this regular season came to a close. What happens today will leave two cities feeling rather justifiably shorted when the thrill of making the postseason ends in a single day. Fortunately for Selig, this year those cities will not be the louder voices in, say, New York or Boston.

I guess we will see how this goes tonight, and there's a strong possibility we could indeed see two highly thrilling contests that delight many a fan. However, as someone who has long felt that the Division Series needs to be extended to seven games, adding one more round with of even shorter length is adding mistakes upon errors. I'm already feeling sorry for the losers, although I've actually got a genuine rooting interest in this year's trial run, so that adds an element of possible personal pain too.

I have yet to see any predictions for this round posted on the usual sites I compared my picks to in the past, but maybe I'll add them later (don't hold your breath though). For now, here's my two picks in descending order of confidence:

Atlanta Braves over St. Louis Cardinals

Kris Medlen's been about as good as any team could ask for, and Atlanta has won 23 straight games that he's started. This would be an incredibly bad time for that streak to come to an end, and the 16-3 Kyle Lohse he's starting against doesn't make that an impossibility. Still, in a close game at Turner Field, I just can't see how the Braves don't push across the runs necessary to stay alive. St. Louis rode their unlikely underdog status all the way to a World Series last year, and Carlos Beltran proved to be an economic replacement for the hole left by the departure of Albert Pujols. However, the Braves took five of six from the Cards this year and the only two St. Louis hitters who have had any real success against Medlen this season won't be playing.

Baltimore Orioles over Texas Rangers

There's the part of me that reads the Dallas newspaper and knows that this is the type of game that Yu Darvish was brought here to pitch this season. Josh Hamilton needs to atone for an enormous fielding sin in Oakland, and a raucous home crowd can help the bats of the Rangers come to life. However, something's gone terribly amiss in Texas, a team that was twice within a strike of winning last year's World Series and now has responded by becoming the first team to blow a five game division lead with only 10 games to play. There is also the part of me that associates Buck Showalter with being the manager in the losing clubhouse of early playoff games, but the baseball postseason is far from predictable. And for some reason, I just have the feeling that the unlikely Orioles end up adding more heartbreak for Rangers fans.