Well, here’s something interesting: In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Cubs president Theo Epstein said that he played a part in proposing a best-of-three series to determine MLB’s wild card winners:

“We threw out something a few years ago about making it a two out of three, but with a doubleheader the first day because days are at a premium that time of year, and you don’t want the teams that win the division to have to wait too long and then get cold. It’s not fair to them. That didn’t pass. It got rejected. “But we’ll see. I think honestly, not just kissing up here, but the commissioner (Rob Manfred) and his people have a really good feel for how to appeal to TV and also what’s fair, what respects the integrity of the regular season. And they’re open-minded. So I would expect that it evolves over the years, maybe in the next (collective bargaining agreement).”

The Cubs’ situation in 2015 perfectly demonstrates some of the issue with MLB’s current system. Epstein’s team may very well finish the season with a better record than both the division-leading Mets and Dodgers, despite playing an unbalanced schedule in a division that includes the teams with baseball’s best and second-best records.

And so the Cubs, even if they end up with a better record against better competition than the majority of division winners, will likely see their season reduced to a single road game in Pittsburgh. And the Pirates, for owning the second-best record in the sport despite playing the Cardinals 18 times, risk seeing their postseason end after only one game if the Cubs happen to take it.

As Epstein points out, that just so happens to be the way it shook out this year, and over time the Cubs may benefit from the same particulars punishing them now. But it’s unfair nonetheless: Adding a second wild card and forcing the wild card teams into a one-game play-in contest was meant to reinforce the value of baseball’s 162-game season, but in this case, it cheapens it.

There has got to be a better way. And while Epstein’s best-of-three idea would serve the dual purpose of giving wild card teams more than one game’s worth of chances to extend their seasons and further enhancing the value of the division title by taxing the wild-card teams, it does little to solve the issue the Cubs and Pirates currently face. Even if the Pirates were to get three straight home postseason games to vie for the NLDS instead of the one, they could still easily go home while five lesser teams take automatic Division Series bids.

One slightly better idea, based in part on an email from a reader at my old site: First, expand the Majors to 32 teams, both to balance out the divisions in this plan and to make any and all changes a bit more palatable to the Players Association.

Eliminate both Central divisions and distribute those teams by geography into the Easts and the Wests. Depending on how and where the league expands, this might require putting the Cubs in the NL West and the White Sox in the AL East, making Chicago’s Halstead St. the country’s official east-west divide in the eyes of Major League Baseball. But those are just details. Moving on.

Now you’ve got four eight-team divisions. You can maintain imbalanced schedules for logistic purposes and to keep fostering regional rivalries, though obviously all teams will play fewer games against each particular divisional opponent. Also, you can go ahead and eliminate season-long Interleague Play, which still just seems weird.

All four division winners automatically advance to the Division Series. The four non-pennant-winning clubs with the best records in each league (no matter which division they’re in) play Wild Card games, with the one- and two-seeds both getting the home games. (Maybe you go wacky with it and go for Epstein’s three-games-in-two-days idea, which is fun.)

That system would increase the importance of winning a division in the regular season, maintain all the TV-friendly elimination games the league loves, and reduce (though not completely destroy) the inequities that come from having wild cards based on teams’ records in imbalanced schedules.