BASEBALL: Expanded playoffs appear inevitable

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) - Commissioner Bud Selig's plan to expand baseball's playoffs to 10 teams gained a sense of inevitability after little to no opposition emerged during meetings this week with owners and general managers.

Selig said his special 14-man committee will discuss adding two wild-card teams when it meets Dec. 7 during the winter meetings in nearby Lake Buena Vista.

"We will move ahead, and move ahead pretty quickly," Selig said Thursday after three days of meetings concluded.

A change would have to be approved by owners, who next meet Jan. 12-13 in Paradise Valley, Ariz., and by the players' association, which has said it is open to the extra round. The additional games also would have to be sold to baseball's national television partners and slotted into a crowded schedule that already has pushed the World Series into November in the past two years.

Because baseball's labor contract runs to December 2011, the extra round of playoffs is not likely to start until 2012.

"I'm not going to rule out anything," Selig said. "We'll just proceed and whatever we decide, then we'll just see how fast we can get it done. Once we pass something, I'm always anxious to get it done."

Selig's committee includes managers Tony La Russa, Jim Leyland and Mike Scioscia, and former manager Joe Torre.

There would be two wild-card teams in each league, and the wild-card teams would meet to determine which advances to division series with the three first-place teams in each league.

Some would have the new round be best-of-three, and others would have it as a one-game winner-take-all game. The mechanics appear to be at issue more than the concept.

"I pretty much know where all the constituencies are now," Selig said. "Eight is very fair number but so is 10."

Before leaving the meeting, Texas Rangers president Nolan Ryan agreed with the premise that the extra round of playoffs was more a matter of how than if.

"I think that's right," he said.

Baseball doubled its postseason teams to four in 1969 and again to eight in 1995, a year later than intended because of a players' strike that wiped out the 1994 World Series. The vote to first add wild cards took place in September 1993.

The regular-season schedule will almost certainly not be reduced from 162 games.