Winners only, please.

How handy it is to belittle the National League West. It easily becomes the NL Worst or the NL Weakest or the NL Waste. I prefer the last one myself, since I made it up.

Hands are being wrung in the halls of baseball - the place where serious sentinels of our national pastime hang out - over the possibility that one of these wastrels will clutter up the postseason, like a hobo standing in line to kiss the bride.

Baseball is much too important and too hallowed to allow such an obvious mistake to take place. Did we not just last season have the undeserving Rockies exposed by the Red Sox? Shudder to think that might happen again.

And see how proved right were the doubters since the Rockies have reverted to type?

The rules require some team from the most woebegone grouping in baseball to be represented in the postseason, no matter that the division winner might lose more games than it wins.

Going into Tuesday's games, for example, both the Dodgers and the Diamondbacks were under .500, a sin at least as dire as using the wrong fork. Tsk. Tsk.

Fair-minded sorts, mostly to the east of us, look around and see the chilling possibility that either New York or Philadelphia might be excluded with much better records, the same with Milwaukee or St. Louis.

Even with the best record in the league now, the Cubs could yet find themselves barred at the end, while one of those short-history upstarts from better climates are invited in.

How great the horror of such a thing, if so perfectly Cub-like. To be 100 years between titles and then kissed off by inferiors.

Never mind that the issue is the wild card, a hybrid gimmick with no pedigree of its own. This is like arguing over a parking space.

There have been suggestions, not blogs but honest considerations, that for the good of the game and for fairness all around, maybe the NL Waste ought to do the decent thing and forgo the postseason, accept a consolation prize, something like a participant medal and a pat on the head.

Given no divisions, a condition in which baseball managed to exist for longer than the way it is now, the leader of the NL Waste would be only the seventh-best team in the league, some nine games out of first place.

The Rockies, hanging somewhere between hope and fantasy, would be double digits behind rather than the fluctuating half dozen or so.

Worse yet, because even the Rockies lurk, if any of the teams were somewhere more desperate, parked beyond optimism as they should be, they would be lopping off players to shore up real contenders.

What to do about Brian Fuentes, for example, if the Rockies just won't be awful enough to make him irrelevant? It is a solid baseball tradition that teams with no hope give away their futures before the trading deadline. So how dare the Rockies consider holding on to Matt Holliday.

If only one team, say the Diamondbacks, who began the season as if they were going to win the division by May, would do the decent thing and run off and hide, then the others could get on with figuring out next season.

But, no. They would rather make a race of it, even if the race is being run on four flat tires and no spare (that would be San Diego). It is still a race.

How thoughtless to build excitement out of alibis. Teams in the West - or, the Waste - have been neutered by injuries, any one of them able to roll out a list of missing stars. It ought to be called the milk carton division.

But this raises no sympathy from any team that might be left behind just because of geography. And it is not that at all, since the American League West has mostly good teams, and a lot of good that does any of them but the Angels, who are about to lap poor Texas and Oakland.

Were the Rockies in the AL West, they would be nearly three times as far from first place as they are now. And where's the fun in that?

Would we rather have one team running away, or four of five teams taking turns cheering each other up? Misery does love company and there is a lot of that to be shared.

As another newspaperman once advised, limp West, young man.