The St. Louis Cardinals clinched the National League Wild Card Wednesday night and will be going to the post-season. I’ve written before about my disdain for the Wild Card system that Major League Baseball has been using since 1995.

Naturally, the question I get asked often is whether I’ll be rooting for the Cardinals now, since they are the Wild Card this post-season. And the answer is, of course, YES!

There’s nothing logically contradictory about that. In the same way that you can criticize the Patriot Act and still be a patriotic American, I can criticize the current three-division-plus-wild-card arrangement and still be a loyal Cardinals fan. On the positive side, if there were no divisions or wild cards, and instead the four teams in the National League with the best records advanced to the playoffs, the Cardinals would still make it. It’s not like the 2008 season where the Dodgers — the eighth-place team overall in the league that year — went to the playoffs because they won a weak division.

The Cardinals face the Philadelphia Phillies in the National League Division Series starting Saturday.