Whenever central baseball introduces some superfluous and mildly absurd change into baseball, there are always a number of people who proclaim it the death of the game — and it never is.

As offensive as the designated hitter rule is, we’ve had a good number of David Ortiz and Edgar Martinez at-bats to marvel at because of it, and baseball has thrived. Interleague play has proved to be every bit as ridiculous in practice as it is in theory — but not ridiculous enough to kill the appeal of a well-executed hit and run. The awarding of home field advantage in the World Series to the team whose league wins the All-Star Game is probably the worst idea since Charlie Finley tried to introduce an orange ball. But it’s easily enough ignored. Because all of these asinine ideas have proved not to be quite so bad as their enemies claimed, one should always be wary of getting too shrill about new stupid ideas. Still, it’s hard not to get a bit overexcited about this year’s changes in baseball’s postseason format. It’s difficult to tell whether they’re more risible in their own right, or in their role as a possible stand-in for more radical changes.

The lesser change is perhaps the least-exciting reward imaginable for finishing the year with the most wins in your league (provided you happen to be playing in one of the alternating years when you’re eligible for a reward for finishing with the most wins): You get to pick whether you have one or two off-days during the first of the postseason’s three rounds! This is supremely lame. Not only is it not a big reward, like the bye that some football teams can earn for having a good record; it’s not even a reward anyone can easily explain. Can you imagine Vin Scully trying to explain this to the masses on the last day of the season as the Dodgers bravely give it their all? “They clinched a week ago, but they’re playing hard — they want this Thursday off to play golf, and no one’s going to stop them!”

A far more consequential change, though — and the one that actually dictates the other change — is that a mind-bending number of offdays were introduced into the playoff schedule, which was released in May. Last year in the National League Championship Series, the Mets and the St. Louis Cardinals played seven games over eight days, with one off day. If they end up in a NLCS rematch this year and go down to the last game again, they’ll play seven games over 11 days, with four off days.

Even if it may not be the death of playoff baseball, this will be ugly. Between the demands of the several hundred television stations that pay huge rights fees to broadcast playoff games, and the demands placed on players by today’s five-hour playoff games, this sort of thing was probably inevitable. That doesn’t mean this isn’t a cause for mourning, though.

What makes the baseball season distinct isn’t that it is, as people say, a marathon. Rather, it’s that it’s a marathon followed by a really brutal sprint. This change makes the season seem more like a marathon followed by a light jog, punctuated by plenty of water breaks, and a lunch at which a local architect will give a lecture on the area’s pre-colonial structures. It will dissipate tension, make luck even more important than it is now, and cause several 19thcentury baseball patriarchs to roll in their graves. We don’t need it. This may not be as bad as the designated hitter. But for the fan who thinks there ought to be only two playoff teams in each league, it’s plenty bad.

What is really worrying, though, is that now that this schedule has been introduced, it will now be impossible for baseball and television executives to not notice that they’ve cleared enough room to easily increase the length of the divisional series to seven games apiece. The first round of the National League playoffs this year, for instance, will start on October 3 and carry through to the 9th if necessary, with an off day on the 10th, followed the next day by the start of the NLCS. That’s three off days in total, more than enough to squeeze in another two games.

When money is there to be taken, someone will generally take it, and it’s in fact surprising that the first round hasn’t already been increased in length. These new changes, insofar as they make that lengthening more likely, are therefore to be scoffed at. Baseball will survive with our new, somewhat flaccid postseason series. It will also survive if the first round goes to seven games. In all circumstances, it will even thrive, and present us with enough thrilling series that we wouldn’t otherwise have been able to see.

But we don’t need to like new rules, even if they don’t kill the game.

tmarchman@nysun.com