Major League Baseball would never change the strike zone after the division series. The NFL wouldn’t make a team gain 15 yards for a first down after the wild-card round.

So why is it that NASCAR decides to change the rules for one of its playoff races after the 10-race Chase begins? Because that’s the kind of stuff that NASCAR does that makes me question their credibility.

This week NASCAR announced that it was increasing the size of the restrictor plate 1/64 of an inch for the Oct. 23 running of the Good Sam Club 500 at Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway. According to NASCAR this will increase the output of the Sprint Cup cars by seven-to-10 horsepower.

NASCAR is also recalibrating the pressure relief valve on the cooling system to eight pounds per square inch. I have no idea what that means. But apparently the end result will be less of the two-by-two drafting that defined Sprint Cup racing at Talladega and Daytona, the two tracks that require the horsepower-draining plates between the carburetor and the intake manifold, this year.

Robin Pemberton, NASCAR’s vice president of competition, claims the revisions will make for more entertaining racing for fans.

I was a fan of the two-car drafts. I may have been in the minority on that one, but I think that it was something different and we sure as hell have seen worse racing on the restrictor-plate tracks.

But here is my real beef: Why would you throw another wild card into the Chase’s one real wild-card race?

By the time teams arrive at Talladega in a month, the Chase will be five races deep and they will be hitting a track with a package they have never seen before.

Who knows what the larger plate and whatever-the-other-thing-is does to the way the cars get around the 2.66-mile high banks down in Alabama? Sure the cars will have more power, but how is additional horsepower going to react to this particular aero-package? I know NASCAR won’t be going into this thing blind and have some indication as to what it will do to the cars, but there is no way to test it under race conditions.

That is a too big of a kink to put into the system in the midst of what NASCAR hopes will be a tight championship hunt. The last thing they want is this decision to ultimately play into who wins this year’s Cup.

And, good Lord, don’t let Jimmie Johnson win at Talladega. If that happens, everyone will say that NASCAR rigged it to help Jimmie win championship number six. And if Dale Earnhardt Jr. wins, we might as well shut the whole thing down before the conspiracy theorists start rioting and burn the NASCAR headquarters down.

Race fans like consistency. Sure, maybe some viewer complained about the two-car draft this year, but does the possibility of a better show trump the uncertainty that this whole deal puts on race teams and their chances for winning a championship this year?

I say no.

Contact Andy Cagle at earthlink.net