Thursday, Bud Selig said he thinks baseball is moving “inexorably” to a 10-team postseason for 2012, meaning two wild-card playoff teams in each league. Beginning the postseason with a pair of one-game, winner-take-all wild-card games is exactly what baseball needs. It needs the energy and the drama. It needs a bigger buzz or splash to open its postseason. Most importantly, its most critical games need an injection of that same “event” feel that blows NFL playoff TV ratings through the roof. Baseball has a chance to create that with a pair of wild-card play-in games.

Why do you think people watch “Dancing With the Stars”? They don’t have to be previously invested. They know it’s a self-contained time allotment. They know it’s a live event and at the end someone will advance and someone will go home. That’s Kirstie Alley out there for crying out loud and people are riveted and participating in the voting. Those are the people MLB has to get excited about its postseason: the casual fan who can buy into a do-or-die scenario for a night. They didn’t watch all 162 games during the season, but they’ll absolutely watch with everything on the line. That’s the consumer baseball needs to lasso here.

– Steve Berthiaume, ESPN.com.

So look: I realize what Berthiaume is saying here is probably correct. Major League Baseball doesn’t need to pull any stunts to convince me to watch postseason baseball because I’m going to watch postseason baseball anyway, plus, I don’t know, 200-some regular-season games every year. I am the audience the league can depend on no matter what it does, which is, I guess, the thing.

But I still think adding a one-game Wild Card playoff is silly.

A big part of the reason I enjoy baseball so much is that it’s not “Dancing With the Stars.” In any single-elimination contest, a couple bad breaks or one down day could mean the more talented competitor is ousted by some sucker. The beauty of Major League Baseball’s 162-game regular season is that good teams have tons and tons of time to distinguish themselves from the bad ones, and though luck still plays a role, it’s exceptionally rare that some relatively crappy team just flukes its way into a World Series championship.

Adding a one-game playoff means an inferior team has the opportunity to advance in place of a better one on the strength of one game. And one game in baseball just isn’t enough to determine anything besides who won one game. Now look: Seven-game series are hardly big samples or proper indicators of talent, but they are certainly less capricious than single contests.

In every season since 2006, the American League Wild Card winner has been at least five games better than the next best Wild Card contender. That doesn’t make for very exciting postseason chases, sure, but it means the four best teams move on. Last year the Yankees finished six games ahead of the Red Sox. They play in the same division. Six games is so many more than one game. The Yankees spent 162 grueling games showing themselves to be better than the Red Sox. And you want to give Boston a chance to undo all that in one game?

I understand that part of the logic, or the rhetoric around it at least, is that it should be harder for Wild Card teams to reach the World Series. I suppose that makes sense, even if Wild Card teams frequently finish with better records than one of the division champs.

But while adding a Wild Card and a one-game playoff does indeed lessen the odds of a specific Wild Card team winning it all, because of the whims of short series it doesn’t really lessen the odds of any Wild Card team advancing. It just introduces one more (and one lesser) team into the equation.

To me — and this isn’t happening — the answer has always been expanding to 32 clubs, dividing the teams into eight four-team divisions and eliminating the Wild Card entirely. That way no division would be doubly rewarded for having several terrible teams in its basement and every playoff team would have won a pennant. Plus, adding a couple clubs might very well reintroduce some sexy, gaudy offensive numbers into the game, and shrinking the divisions could intensify the rivalries therein. In this economy, obviously, it’s unreasonable to expect. But hey, at least 50 new jobs!