Cardinals fans may have a bone to pick with Jim Bowden's controversial Wild Card opinion

In what was one of the St. Louis Cardinals' final gasps in their long cycle of postseason relevance, the team fell to the Los Angeles Dodgers in the one-game National League Wild Card Series in 2021. It proved to be the final one-game Wild Card playoff, as the postseason expanded in 2022 and Wild Card series became best-of-three tournaments. That appears to be the best option for the sport, but Jim Bowden, a columnist for The Athletic and a former MLB general manager, yearns for a return to the one-game Wild Card round.

The Wild Card Game was introduced in 2012 and lasted through 2021 but didn't exist in the 2020 series, which was altered by COVID-19. Although the drama of having one game decide who advances in the postseason and who stays home made for riveting television, baseball is simply too much of a crapshoot and too much of a marathon to allow one scheduled game to determine which team should move on.

Game 163, on the other hand, would be a welcome return, as it wasn't an artificially created one-game playoff; rather, it was a natural result of teams with identical records that were fighting for a division title or Wild Card position. Single-game drama that emerges organically is a good thing, but baseball shouldn't get greedy and force it on the sport every year when the result is generally a coin flip.

Bowden's comment about how baseball has enough of a sample size to condense the Wild Card Series could also be a reason to support the opposing viewpoint of keeping the series as a best-of-three: Can the underdog prevail after losing the first game? It's only happened once before!

Bowden's desire for the one-game playoff won't sit well with Cardinals fans

Cardinals fans still have a sour taste from the 2021 one-and-done game. The Cardinals went on an absolute heater near the end of that season, winning 17 consecutive games, which pushed them into the playoffs. Their opponent, the mighty Dodgers, coasted into the Wild Card round with a 106-56 record, the best ever by a Wild Card team and just one game behind the division champion San Francisco Giants.

A 40-year-old Adam Wainwright delivered a strong performance and gave the Cardinals a strong chance to win, throwing 5.1 innings and allowing just one run on four hits. Alas, the game ended in heartbreak for the Cardinals, as the team lost 3-1 after a walk-off home run from Chris Taylor. Alex Reyes, the one who surrendered the two-run bomb in what proved to be the final game of his far-too-short career, received the bulk of the blame, but the Cardinals were 0-for-11 with runners in scoring position, failing to capitalize on a multitude of chances.

Luckily for supporters of the current Wild Card structure, it doesn't seem like owners will allow any games to be subtracted anytime soon (other than those that could bleed off of the schedule because of a lockout). There's no turning back the clock to give the Cardinals another chance to knock off the vaunted Dodgers in 2021, but despite Bowden's qualms, baseball is in a better place after adjusting the Wild Card round.

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