On any given day, any Major League Baseball team can beat another. Exactly one week ago, the Yankees were shut out 5-0 by the lowly Kansas City Royals, a team with less than one quarter of the Bombers’ payroll and the worst record in baseball.

So how is it, then, that in the current playoff structure, where 11 wins in a maximum of 19 games, is all it takes to win a World Series, that the best team in baseball truly wins? Most of the time, it doesn’t.

Baseball is a game of averages, of hot streaks and cold streaks. A team that hits its stride in the playoffs — e.g. a 2003 Florida Marlins team, as mentioned in Friday’s issue — can go all the way to a championship, but does that team really prove it’s king in such a small sample of games?

Unfortunately, the nature of baseball is such that the best teams only win 60 percent of the time, and thus no playoff system can truly determine which team is the best — a set of five games is not a true indicator of superiority, nor is one of seven games.

So, what does one do?

No one is proposing to eliminate the playoffs, as October is the most exhilarating time of baseball season. Though the system can never be perfected because of baseball’s inherent streakiness and day-to-day swings, there is a minor alteration to the MLB playoff structure that can be made so that the World Series champion is as representative of which ball club is truly tops as possible.

In addition to the Wild Card series (as described on Friday: a five-game series before the Division Series that matches up two wild card teams from each league while the division champions rest) that has already been instituted, the Division (or should I say, Upset) Series is extended to seven games. Again, a seven-game series will not always advance the better team, but it has a higher likelihood of doing so than a five-game series, without a doubt.

Yes, the Wild Card series is a five-game series, but it could just as easily be three — its purpose is not to advance the better team, but rather to give the division winners their fair shake. To make the Wild Card series seven games would mean the playoffs would consist of four seven-game series, which would be absurd; we have to work within the confines of a reasonably designed playoff schedule as best we can. It’s for that same reason that the World Series could never be, say, eleven games.

So, here is the final look at how the new playoff system would work: three division winners from each league and two wild card winners, and the season is shortened to 154 games to make time for the aforementioned Wild Card series, a series designed to restore a desire in teams to win their divisions. Then, in order to better gauge which team is best, extend the Division Series to seven games, followed by a standard League Championship Series and World Series of seven games.

This structure is not perfect, it never will be perfect — that’s the nature of baseball. But, the MLB playoffs can be made better, be it through these alterations or a different set. Any way you cut it, Major League Baseball needs to recognize that the wild card has tarnished the integrity of the divisional set-up and that the current length of the Division Series provides for far too many upsets.