The Wild Card night was undoubtedly wild.  Both home teams suffered the indignity of being one-and-done’d at their own ballpark, watching their opponents celebrating on the field.

It wasn’t only the players that were on the field in Atlanta. Turner Field became a field of trash after a controversial infield-fly ruling went against the Braves. MLB Commissioner Bud Selig was hoping that the Wild Card games would provide drama, but he would never have thought it would come via a 19 minute delay with players taking cover in the dugouts while Joe Torre and the umpires tried to make sense of the mess that had been created.

There’s no doubt it was an incredibly tough break for the Braves, yet the departing Chipper Jones was also on the money after the game when he stated “ultimately I think that when we look back on this loss, we need to look at ourselves in the mirror … we put ourselves in that predicament, down 6-2”.

As soon as the Wild Card game format was announced, we always knew there would be times when it would seem a bit unfair. The Braves won six more games than the Cardinals in the regular season and yet they will not be competing in the Division Series due to losing a single game to St. Louis.

However, the counter-argument is simply that you can avoid this risk by winning your division and we had the perfect example of that with the Texas Rangers.

Texas were in control of their destiny with a week of the regular season to go. Having made the World Series in consecutive years, they were on course to win the AL West again and had they done so they probably would have been favourites to make it back to the Fall Classic for the third time.

You won’t find many people more willing than me to heap praise on the Oakland A’s for clawing back the deficit and sweeping the Rangers to win the division, yet the fact remains that Texas threw the division away by allowing the A’s to have a sniff in the first place.

Ron Washington’s men can legitimately feel a slight sense of grievance that the Detroit Tigers made it to the Division Series despite winning five less games to take a weaker division. Still, everyone knew the rules when the season started and the main rule is to win your division and take everything else out of the equation.

Texas failed to do it and they paid the price, being beaten fair and square by the Baltimore Orioles.

With the Wild Card games done and dusted, we move on to what should be a captivating Division Series stage in which only three of the eight participants are following up on a playoff appearance last year.

In the American League, the Orioles have made it to the Division Series for the first time since 1997, while the A’s are back in the postseason for the first time since 2006.  As for the National League, the Cardinals are the only team of the four Division Series entrants to have played in the postseason last year.  The Giants and Reds missed out in 2011, while the Washington Nationals have made the playoffs for the first time since moving to the U.S. capital in 2005.

It goes to show just how competitive MLB is and why making predictions is always liable to make you look silly.

That doesn’t make taking a guess any less fun. My predictions for the Division Series winners are the A’s (of course), Yankees, Giants and Nationals.