Lincicome: Postseason baseball? More like October Idiocy

Suddenly, baseball is everywhere. Imagine that. No, wait. Hurry and you can see it for yourself at Guaranteed Rate Field, where you had been planning to go sooner or later.

A disclaimer. Anything that keeps Ozzie Guillen and his sound effects around a little longer can't be all bad. But otherwise, I have issues.

Postseason baseball (10 teams! One champion!) is not a whole new ballgame. Same game. Same rules. Still, baseball in October is different, and lately even in Chicago it is a mini-pattern. Here the White Sox are again, replacing the fragmented Cubs as an option.

You remember the Sox. Played a game against the Yankees in a cornfield.

As phony and unnatural as that was, playoff baseball is worse. It is too rushed. It contradicts the essence of the sport. It has a time limit. Wild card play-in games. Five games in the division series, seven in the league series, seven in the World Series, a whole other season where something like 40 games are possible.

But with the end in sight. This makes everything more vivid, more vital, more memorable. This changes baseball into, what? Auto racing? Wrestling? A soccer shootout?

Baseball becomes a pencil without an eraser in October. Mistakes become indelible and live long beyond the good of a routine season. This can't be a good thing.

Tom Hanks was wrong. There is crying in baseball, and some of it is in this column. Playoffs are abrupt. Baseball is perpetual. Playoffs are contrived. Baseball is complete. Baseball has series.

Baseball has a season full of series. Three-game series, home and away series. Interleague series (another stupid idea.) World Series. Without asking, it manages to shoehorn in several Division Series. And it can't get that right. The next best team in baseball (the Dodgers) must play the best team in baseball (the Giants) as an appetizer.

The League Championship Series (Serieses?) have only diminished the World Series. Playoffs have reduced the regular baseball season into some kind of temporary triage.

All of this became inevitable when baseball carved itself into divisions. Like football. Divisions have five teams, arranged more or less on the compass, east, west and central, forgetting the south altogether, a reasonable omission.

Baseball originated the playoff way back when it made more sense than it does now, when the champions of the two leagues met in what became known as the World Series, even if the world was limited to a few cities and two time zones.

Baseball plays 162 games to find 10 teams that are not better than a few others. Football now uses 17 games to do that.

Why does baseball do this? It wanted autumn back. The sport that has spring and summer to itself said it had lost autumn to football. Football is played one day a week, (not counting the isolated Thursday-Monday gimmicks) and baseball insisted it had lost a whole page of the calendar to a sport that plays weekends. Baseball was lying.

Pennant races became wild card chases. All that tension for one game. It seemed possible for a moment this season that four teams might tie for one wild card spot. Great. More playoffs.

Baseball is so insecure about its appeal that it contradicts its whole season by concocting a pressure pot at the end. It hustles hopes. Like hockey. Like basketball.

Baseball has given away its season so it can peddle October to television. Like college basketball does March. March Madness? October Idiocy. Nice motto.

Use it without charge.

Wisdom as doggerel has promoted presidential campaigns and incited protests and fueled insurrections, so baseball's attempt to be modern is just another customer. But baseball doesn't even have a catch phrase. Postseason. Sounds like a wake.

Baseball needs new money. Or says it does. Baseball is doing this not because it pays Mike Trout $37 million but because it pays Didi Gregorious $12 million a season. Bad horses eat as much as good ones.

Baseball is a pastime; it is not a pageant. Its pleasures are in its accumulation, not in its separation. The season is a companion, not an usher.

How bad an idea is playoffs and baseball? Worse than sliding mittens. Worse than the designated hitter. Worse than lights at Wrigley Field.

Worse than all that two-seam, four-seam gobbledygook.

Worse than sabermetrics. And nothing is worse than sabermetrics.

Wait. Hold on. Ozzie is about to explain something ...