King Kaufman and Rob Neyer weigh in

I thought my baseball question was a good one so I fired it off to the criminally underread King Kaufman of Salon.com. To my surprise he replied pretty quickly:

It's a good question. I don't know. It actually makes sense to me, but I can't really articulate a rule. I asked Rob Neyer if knew why the 163rd game doesn't seem to count against the loser in this scenario. Here's what he said:

"Yeah, it's sort of a weird situation. I think everybody just sort of decided that while that 163rd game "counts," it's not relevant vis a vis the Wild Card standings. Which seems fair to me. I've never seen an official explanation either, though. -r"

Thanks for writing.

king

What did we learn from this matter? That baseball has a silly little loophole that they didn't seem to be ready to exercise in 2000 for the Mariners or A's, but were more than ready to employ for the Red Sox or Yankees this season. Baseball is gay, but we already knew that. Also, we learned that the thirty bucks a year for my Salon.com subscription is more than worth it. Most importantly we learned that ESPN's Rob Neyer signs his emails "-r". So that's that.
-w

www.salon.com (pay site but you can view it for 24 hours if you watch a short ad)
www.robneyer.com