The Cardinals are fading fast, so I might as well seize the opportunity to point this out while I can: Major League Baseball’s Wild Card system is unfair. A lot of times it works out fine and good teams wind up in the playoffs, and certainly it makes for some exciting pennant races, plus there’s always a lot of randomness at play anyway.

But the idea of rewarding the non-division winner with the best record doesn’t really make sense so long as the clubs play unbalanced schedules. Those Cardinals get to play the bulk of their games against the Astros, Brewers, Cubs and Pirates, four teams toiling well below .500.

And yet St. Louis is only a half game better than the Rockies in the Wild Card race, even though Colorado regularly squares off with the Giants, Dodgers and Padres, all of whom are above .500.

The example isn’t perfect because the Cardinals are only 31-29 against the N.L. Central, so it’s not like they’ve coasted into playoff contention by dominating their weak opponents. But then, what would their record be if they faced the rigors of playing in any other division?

It strikes me that you can have an unbalanced schedule or a Wild Card, but you probably shouldn’t have both. I don’t imagine this system is going anywhere so maybe I’m just an old man yelling at clouds, but to me it doesn’t seem like it would be too hard to come up with a better one.

A while back I suggested (twice, actually) that the whole “Year of the Pitcher” thing might have something to do with the league-wide pitching talent finally catching up to the number of teams after expansions in 1993 and 1998, among other things.

So I imagine Major League Baseball could jumpstart offenses a bit by expanding to 32 clubs and giving each league four four-team divisions, eliminating the Wild Card.

Some would argue that shaking up the divisions would destroy certain rivalries, since in that model perhaps the Mets would no longer play the Braves, boohoo. But extant rivalries would intensify and new rivalries would develop.

Another potential downside would be the possibility that teams in each division run away with it and there’s not much meaningful baseball in September. But that’s basically happening in the American League this year anyway. Unless the White Sox manage to make a run in the Central, the only compelling race in the Junior Circuit is which A.L. East team wins the division and which takes the Wild Card.

A nice additional benefit to expansion could be the possibility that it would make the players’ union more amenable to some kind of salary cap or a more punitive luxury tax system to prevent the Yankees from doing what they do, which seems to piss people off so much. The Mets annually show us that there’s no strict correlation between payroll and winning, but I suppose it wouldn’t hurt the game to level the playing field a bit.

And I don’t know about that stuff and I haven’t thought it all the way through. I just know that if the Cardinals manage to scrap out the Wild Card this year, it’s kind of a travesty given how much harder the haul has been for the teams in the other N.L. divisions.

I realize, of course, that lots of things about baseball aren’t fair and that random events like that are a big part of the game, but I do feel the onus should be on the league to make everything as equitable as possible.