According to Ronald Blum of the Associated Press, Bud Selig expects the playoffs will be expanded for the 2012 season, saying:

“We’re working on dates right now. That’ll all take place. It looks to me like we’ll have it because I’ve told everybody we have to have it. It’ll be exciting. One-game playoff, it will start the playoffs in a very exciting manner.”

Blum says a divisional tie would be broken in a one-game playoff at the conclusion of the regular season. However, Ken Rosenthal of FOX Sports says there are issues with the schedule in 2012 which makes implementing the new playoff format a challenge this season.

Blum says talks will resume next week and officials will decide by March 1 whether the new playoff format will begin this season.

In November, Buster Olney of ESPN said the new playoff system would be implemented in 2012 – the two best records to not win a division in each league would face-off in a one-game playoff to determine who advances to play the top seed in the Division Series.

By adding a second Wild Card team, according to Mike Silva, the Mets would have made the playoffs every year from 1984-1990, as well as in 1997, 1999, 2000, 2006, 2007 and 2008.

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Michael Baron: What a difference this playoff system would have been for this franchise, specifically for the 2007 and 2008 seasons. The discussion (and potentially the state of the Mets) today would be entirely different; we probably wouldn’t be talking about epic collapses and the fallout which has stemmed from them.

I’ve often wondered what the state of the franchise would be today if they had won the last game in 2007 and 2008 and, more recently, how they might have fared as the second Wild Card under the new system. I know, the leads in the division would’ve been gone anyway and they wouldn’t have any momentum heading into those postseasons. But a short series, especially a one-game playoff is a crap-shoot and there’s no telling what might have happened for the Mets if the new system was adopted earlier. Even if they had backed into the one-game playoff and lost, the team’s future might have resulted differently.

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