The more the merrier in baseball playoffs

It's about wanting more. Isn't it always?

"More" is one of the first words we learn when we start talking as toddlers. It's fundamental to our existence.

Major League Baseball finally announced Friday what had been inevitable for a while: Ten of the 30 teams will qualify for the playoffs, starting this season and continuing through the foreseeable future.

They could've waited a year to put this in place with more care, but they didn't. Because they want more.

"I think it was pretty unanimous around the league: The more playoff spots, the better," Rays third baseman Evan Longoria said Thursday. " . . . Once you get into the playoffs, that's revenue for the ballclub. That's more excitement for the players. It would be a no-brainer for everybody."

"I'm not sure there are any cons," Yankees manager Joe Girardi said. "The pros are it adds more teams to the mix. Keeps more teams in it for a longer period of time."

That's two usages of "more" by each man. A tie between the Yankees and Tampa Bay.

Fundamentally, it's hard not to like the revision. The one-game wild-card play-in will kick off the postseason with a jolt of urgency; teams will have to go all out in that game just to stay alive. And it really won't water down the race for the title. The two 2011 clubs that would've made it under this format, the Red Sox and Braves, both were very good.

(And to tackle a natural follow-up to that point: Right, we would've missed out on that phenomenal final night of the 2011 season. But who's to say we won't see that sort of confluence of battles for the second wild card at the end of this season?)

There are two issues about the new wild card that irk us. One is temporary, the other permanent. They both reflect the desire for more.

The permanent objection is that this addition works largely because it covers up old blemishes, rather than being good simply because it's good. The extra berth will eradicate the scenario -- best exemplified by the 2010 Yankees -- in which a team doesn't particularly care whether it wins the division title or the wild card because the difference between the two is just one home game.

It also helps the lower-revenue teams, particularly in the American League, as it's extremely difficult to overcome the Yankees and Red Sox and their respective financial advantages. Now there's another spot for a non-Yankee, non-Red Sox club.

The temporary quibble comes in the introduction of the format for this year instead of 2013. The teams and players were so anxious to get this going that they brought back a discarded relic -- the League Division Series format in which the lower seed hosts the first two games, followed by the next three games at the higher seed -- to squeeze in everything.

You can set your watch to it: Something is going to happen that is going to create a logistical nightmare. It could be weather delays. It could be a three-way tie. It could be an LDS going five games, with the winner immediately starting the League Championship Series. But something will happen, and the result will be the yakosphere (trademark Neil Best) accusing baseball bigwigs of prioritizing dollars over schedule integrity.

Those accusations will be accurate, but the benefits might very well justify the costs. It should be a frenetic postseason, and if we somehow can get through October without any of the aforementioned schedule snafus, they'll have a smarter plan in place next year.

We always want more. And when there's money to be made, we'll always get more.