Brookover: Charlie Manuel is no fan of baseball’s latest playoff change

Unless Ryan Howard doesn’t come back 100%, of course…

In Charlie Manuel’s perfect baseball universe, the best teams in each league at the end of the regular season would meet in the World Series every year.

That’s the way it was when the Phillies manager was growing up in rural Virginia, and Manuel thought it was a plan that worked well.

“You shouldn’t get nothing for second or third,” he said Wednesday after news spread that Major League Baseball will announce another expansion of the playoffs on Thursday. “Baseball has set it up the way they want, of course, and I have nothing to do with it. I’m not knocking baseball at all, but in my opinion I’d like to see the two . . . best teams in baseball in the World Series.”

That train, as Manuel and the Phillies have experienced firsthand the last two seasons, left the station long ago. It was swept away by expansion, perpetually growing salaries, and the financial need to feed the television monster for whatever it was willing to pay billions of dollars.

...“It’s hard to swallow sometimes when you play all year and you win a lot of games and you lose to somebody who did not play as good as you consistently all year,” Manuel said. “But that’s the way it goes, and that’s the process we live with, so I’m not knocking it.”

Baseball just got different again. It didn’t get better.