Baseball's Race to the Middle.

Your team didn't get much better

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The Major League Baseball trade deadline was more activity than achievement, but that’ll happen when, as a league, you’ve gamed the system such that franchises know they don’t have to go for broke. They just have to remain, ummm…viable.

Several teams did that. The Padres traded roughly a million guys in part to shore up their bullpen, which they needed to do in order to compensate for an unexpectedly thin starting rotation. The Seattle Mariners gave up four of their top 30 prospects, plus Ty France, in an effort to juice their offense.

The Astros overpaid for a starting pitcher. (Consensus view.) The Twins added one reliever. The Giants shipped out a starter, a reliever and a slugger, but then made a late deal to add a veteran infielder/outfielder, which would earn them a shrug emoji if you didn’t understand that staying around .500 keeps them in the hunt.

And that’s the thing. The Padres are 59-51 at this writing, the Mariners 57-53, the Astros 56-52, the Giants 54-56. They’re all plausible, but nobody’s killing it. Minnesota, at 59-48, is the closest in this bunch to being a playoff threat, and the Twins don’t even lead their own division.

This is the kind of middling trade-deadline activity that the latest MLB playoff expansion has wrought. I doubt that a fan base would go after a team for trying to improve, but are these franchises trying to get really good, or just a little better than average?

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The Wild Card standings tell the story. (I don’t know why I put Wild Card in capital letters, but there you go.) Again, as of this writing, the Mariners are 3.5 games out of the third wild card — or, put another way, 3.5 out of the sixth and final American League playoff spot. They’re also statistically tied with the Astros for the A.L. West lead, so you can swap these teams in the Wild Card chase depending upon which one happens to hold the division lead at any given time.

The Padres had a one-half game cushion in the N.L. Wild Card standings. The Giants were 4.5 games out. Back in the A.L., the Twins and KC Royals held the final two Wild Card positions, with both the Red Sox and Mariners on their tails.

So what do you get for a Wild Card? It depends. If you’re the “first” of three W.C. spot-holders, you earn the right to host all the games of your first-round playoff series. The way MLB ginned it up, the top two division-winners in each league get a bye, while the third division-winner is the default No. 3 seed. After that, the three Wild Card spots go by record and square off by seeding.

Confused? Don’t be. It looks like this:

Top two division winners: No first round.

No. 3 seed (the other division winner) vs. No. 6 seed. (No. 3 hosts all games.)

No. 4 seed vs. No. 5 seed. (No. 4 hosts all games.)

Best-of-three format, and then we’re on to the Division Series.

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“Wild Card” itself isn’t a dirty phrase. The World Series has been won eight times by a team that qualified through the wild card process, however it was defined at that point in MLB history. (It used to be a smaller playoff bracket.) The Texas Rangers did it just last year and beat another Wild Card entry, the Diamondbacks, for the championship.

Over the past three decades, moreover, the team with the sport’s best regular-season record has come up short of a World Series title about 80 percent of the time. Baseball is a long, long, long season.

But that’s not what this is about — and by the way, some of the stronger teams, including the Dodgers, Braves, Orioles and Phillies, did add talent of varying amounts at this year’s trade deadline. What this is about is the playoffs expanding to such a point that fair-to-middling is often enough to put you right there for that final wild card.

“Right there” is certainly something, but it sure ain’t a rallying cry.

On balance, I’d say one of the only teams that understood the assignment this year was Tampa Bay. The Rays hit the deadline as a plus-.500 team and a fringy playoff contender, but their front office just recognized the larger truth: They’re not that good this year, and they’d be far better off retooling for a future in which “made the playoffs” is an expected starting point, not a banner to be raised on Opening Day.

One can always argue that the Rays’ sell-off behavior was but a small-market response to a challenging time. On the other hand, look at their results the past decade or so and tell me they don’t have an idea of how this all works. The expanded playoffs have produced a pudgy, sluggish middle of the pack. That’s not terrible if you’re a fan of a team that hopes to fall sideways into a post-season spot, but it’s not the stuff of true-fan dreams.