I’m by no means the only one who has noticed that a five-game series is too short to decide something as important (at least in the baseball world) as who gets to the league championship series.

Dodgers manager Joe Torre, whose team was on the lucky side of a short series against a superior team, wants the first round to go at least seven games, too.

Said Torre, before Game 3: “I’ve always felt that you go 162 games, the first round is important [enough] to have best-of-seven. It’s really a tough situation to adjust to. The best teams get in after 162. And then to send them out for that crapshoot … it’s lucky a lot of times if you win.”

And to some silly person who commented, in a post below, that the Angels are in the worst division in baseball?

Ha! Have you looked around the National League West, where the Dodgers live?

The NL West is five generally inept franchises to the AL West’s four generally inept franchises, aside from the Angels. And I like Oakland’s chances of being competent, any given year, a lot more than I do of any of the five NL West teams.

The Dodgers got the huge break of playing 72 (!) games against the NL West, and went 40-32 — accounting for their plus-.500 finish, at 84-78, because they were under .500 (44-46) against teams that came from anywhere outside the NL West.

The Angels, meanwhile, played only 57 games inside their division (15 fewer than the Dodgers). So, sure, it’s easier to finish first atop a four-team than a five-team group — unless the five-team group is the NL West, which has sucked for two years running.

Also, the same silly person suggested the Angels would finish, like, third in the AL East. Just another guy not paying attention. The Angels went 30-16 against the AL East in the 2008 regular season. They did better against the East than they did against the AL Central (24-17), the AL West (36-21) or the National League (10-8).

I restate the obvious: A five-game playoffs series is a mockery that allows lesser teams to sneak deep into the playoffs on the strength of one good weekend — and ushers good teams into oblivion after a couple of bad games. Baseball should, at the very least, make it a seven-game series in time for the 2009 playoffs.