The National League Central is the best division in baseball, with arguably the three best teams in the National League. Their reward for this excellence, should the Cardinals, Pirates and Cubs all sustain it through the end of the season: a playoff buzzsaw pitting them against each other that will leave just one team remaining in as few as four games.

If the season ended today, the Cubs would play the Pirates in Pittsburgh in a one-game play-in; the winner would then travel to St. Louis to start the NLDS. The winner of that series would advance to the NCLS against the winner of the series between the Dodgers and the Mets.

There is only one scenario in which two NL Central teams could play each other in a seven-game series this October: if a team from either the NL East or the NL West overtakes the Cardinals (and Cubs and Pirates) for the best record in the national league — something that would require both the Dodgers, Giants, Mets or Nationals to play out of their minds for a month and a half AND a semi-collapse by the Cardinals AND neither the Cubs nor Pirates capitalizing on St. Louis's weakness. Possible, but not likely.

Under the current playoff seeding system, the winner of the Wild Card play-in game faces the team with the league's best record in the NLDS, regardless of division. (In the old system with one Wild Card per league, the Wild Card winner couldn't be matched up against a team from their own division in the first round of the playoffs; that restriction was dropped for the current system.)

Personally, I think this is a shame for both general and specific reasons. In general, you want the two best teams in the league playing in the League Championship Series, and it's hard to argue at this point that the two best teams in the National League aren't in the Central. More specifically, a Cubs-Cardinals NLCS would be something to behold (and give a bigger sample size to outweigh any voodoo magic). Can you imagine that Game 7?