We already know that baseball is adding a second wild card to each league for the playoffs this season, but that was approved pretty late in the offseason -- and the World Series schedule had already been set. Thus, a travel day from the divisional series needed to be eliminated in order to accomodate the play-in wild card game and still leave the World Series schedule as is.

Expanded playoffs
The solution? The five-game divisional series will be a 2-3 format in 2012. It was approved Wednesday by the owners, reports CBSSports.com's Jon Heyman. That means the top two division winners in each league will have to play on the road twice before coming home for (up to) three games. The format will then shift back to 2-2-1 next season.

Adding the second wild card for this season was a huge priority for commissioner Bud Selig, and it seems like it was going to get done at any cost -- even if that means altering the format for just one season. I don't quite see that it was such an important issue to force through during spring training and change the entire format of one round of the playoffs, but what's done is done.

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