One can complain about the unbalanced schedule or the inelegance of using the designated hitter only in American League parks, but the real reason to hate interleague play is how it affects what are annually becoming closer and closer races, especially in the wild card hunt.

I looked into this last year and found that ten playoff spots in ten years were altered by the results of these legitimized exhibitions. With the AL again dominating the senior circuit in interleague play, the ultra-tight NL West and wild card races have been turned inside out by interleague results.

The NL wild card has ten clubs separated by six games (as of about 9 PM tonight) and the NL West sees all five clubs within 4.5 games of each other. Take away the interleague games and each races gets tighter at the top even though more teams would drop from contention

Let's take a look. First, here are the current (ish) standings:

Here are the interleague standings. Note that the AL won more than 61% of the games. That's dominance:

Finally, here are the standings as they would appear without the execrable interleague play:

One result that I didn't expect is that the Yankees would be running away with the AL East crown instead of holding a small lead over the Red Sox. I also didn't realize that the Angels would end up right in the middle of the wild card chase.

In the NL, the Dodgers and D-Backs, instead of the Padres, would own the NL West. The Padres and Reds would lose their playoff leads. A number of teams would drop from the wild card hunt, but the top four spots would be within a game and one half of each other.

Wake me up when the AL is winning 90% of the interleague contests, the NL wild card winner is under .500 and all but the truly awful NL teams are in the wild card hunt. It makes about as much sense as the Phils trading both their long relievers from both sides to the team they are chasing in the wild card race, the Reds. Then again, trading their crappy pitchers to the "enemy" might be the most strategic thing this club has done since trading Jim Thome.