Thank you. Pat Stevens.

That's the nothing personal word of the day.

It is Tuesday, September 30th, 2005, the final day of September.

Cat Stevens, as in Wild World,

Kat Stevens, as in the voice that has helped me try to sleep for many, many years and decades, especially recently, a song called Wild World. And we are in the wild world of the wild card. It's baseball

playoff time. And it starts today with four games, best two out of three, three straight days, one stadium.

It is what baseball, when they got together and changed and expanded playoffs, they loved this.

I, of course, voted against it, Coker.

I preferred the one game, an automatic March Madness, one and done wild card game. It was that way for many years. But owners were

disappointed saying we can't play a whole season and then play nine innings and be done. We want to play 18 innings. And so because of travel and TV and the schedule so it's not to have the World Series and with Santa delivering the trophy, the thought was, all right, how about two out of three? That ain't bad, is it?

And that got all the votes. Of course, when a team loses game one of this wild card series,

which starts today at 1 o'clock with the Tigers and the Guardians, you lose game one. It's

almost unanimous, like 12 and 0, you're going to lose the series.

So I'm not quite sure I understand the math, which I haven't understood a lot recently,

but I don't quite understand the math of owners who are happy with a two out of three,

when the math says if you lose game one, you're going to lose,

which makes game one the game of the three game series.

The funny thing about these series, and we're going to go through them, is that we're going to

talk about pitching, because if you have to win a game to avoid elimination or to take a one-nothing lead in a short

series, who's your number one starter? Who's starting this game one? During the regular season,

don't bother me with starting pitchers. It's not important. We only need to go three innings,

four innings. We are focused solely on the bullpen and bolstering the

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