AS IT STANDS TODAY, the Cleveland Guardians and the St. Louis Cardinals would both be protected 3 seeds, while their respective league's top Wild Card holds a better record. In the case of Cleveland,  every  Wild Card team would have a higher winning percentage. However, the Guardians and Cardinals would be able to avoid a head-to-head clash with their league's top seed until the ALCS/NLCS. Major League Baseball's new Postseason arrangement is slotted so division winners are 1-3 regardless. And the brackets do not re-seed  — serving up the "worst" remaining team to the best  —  after the Wild Card Series.  With an ALDS/NLDS upset, Cleveland and St. Louis might not have to play the Houston Astros and Los Angeles Dodgers at all.  If the far-and-away favorites somehow fail to reach baseball's Final Four, the Guardians and Cardinals would  snag home-field advantage by beating their 2 seeds. Should this scenario ("Doomsday" if you're in the league off

THE LATEST ODDS I saw from a sports book had Athletics relocation at -260 and moving to Las Vegas at +150. So there's hope. Not exactly a line I'd be willing to wager $100 on, but they still appear in my Option 1 above for a viable reason.  I feel bad penning a requiem for the Oakland Athletics in any of the other hypothetical scenarios. There are hundreds of California-based jobs on the line. At this point, with the NBA's Warriors and the NFL's Raiders already outta there, there's an entire community's livelihood at stake. The acreage around RingCentral Coliseum and Oracle Arena will begin to look like one of America's ghostly  abandoned amusement parks . Even if the Warriors' move was only 17 miles away, the two organizations  left the A's holding the bag. Sure,  their owners faced backlash   —   internally as loud as the outside noise . Then again, they also weren't the last to leave; the ones "responsible" for Oakland having nothing

Rendering of TVA Arhitects' Proposed Portland MLB Stadium THE PROCESS OF selecting Major League Baseball's 31st and  32nd franchises reminds me an awful lot of Joe Lunardi's Bracketology  each March  — namely the Bubble Watch . Those college basketball teams with a strong-enough (yet weak-enough) record to find themselves on that "First Four Out" line get told the same thing each and every year: Handle your business down the stretch and root hard for every nationally-ranked favorite, playing in a one-bid league, to handle theirs.  If you are the MLB expansion group in Portland or Charlotte, this "win and get some help" situation is the one you currently find yourself in. Las Vegas and Nashville are going to Major League Baseball's equivalent of the "Big Dance." Full stop. You just have to hope and pray they don't steal away your one and only method of joining them.  What We Know: If the Oakland Athletics do not get their Howard Termin