Somehow I never knew about this; I didn’t see them yesterday or the last time I came to Wrigley a few years ago, but the Cubs have a live Dixieland band that walks around the stadium during the game.

Fittingly enough, they’re called the Cubs Band. They feature a cornet, a clarinet, a tuba, a trombone, and a banjo, and they’re pretty sweet.

I have long, long held that the Mets — and most baseball teams — should have some sort of live musical act inside the stadium during games. The Hammond organ is obviously a nice start, but I’m open to all sorts of ideas.

I think it would be particularly badass, for example, if a dominant reliever kept a string quartet on hand to play his entrance song. I’ve written about this before: The Hannibal Lecter approach to closer music. I’ve priced that out with my friend Ben, an orchestra conductor, and he says the cost to keep four top-flight musicians on hand for that type of work for 81 home games a season would be peanuts compared to player salaries. A good reliever could easily get it written into his contract.

But I’m open to most things. A top-flight college basketball pep band would be fine if it played funky arrangements of decent songs. Not like a lame, b-rate pep band, I mean like one of the awesome ones that outshines the basketball team itself. Just filling up a whole section of Citi Field with joyful noise and all that. And absolutely no “25 or 6 to 4″ or “Carry on My Wayward Sun.” It’s time to retire those to the rafters.

A funk band up on the bridge to the Pepsi Porch. Delta Blues in the Delta club. Metal in the Acela restaurant. Anything would be better than trying to get me to sing Sweet Caroline or Rickrolling the entire stadium.

One of the dudes from the Cubs Band told me they’ve been playing together since 1982 and they’re at every game. Cool.

Also, fun fact: I could almost entirely outfit a band like the Cubs band with instruments I have in my house (or at my parents’ house). The only one I don’t have is a tuba, which is ironic because it’s one of the few I can play capably. I really need to practice that banjo.

Walking up Wrigley Field’s concrete ramps to the press box this morning, I caught the inimitable smell of hot cotton candy. I turned a corner and spotted the vendors, at the machine, forming the confection. Around and around, again and again. Sweet and colorful, but nutritionally devoid and questionably palatable.

The Cubs haven’t won a World Series in over 100 years. It seems like every offseason they go about building their team the entirely wrong way. Buy high, sell low. Reward veterans for one good campaign. The whole thing. Around and around, again and again.

And yet the fans keep showing up. Some reporter doing a radio interview on the phone behind me just said that a crowd of 35,000 is a bad day for Wrigley. Seems accurate. Seems like none of them ever boo, either.

It’s weird.

The Cardinals are fading fast, so I might as well seize the opportunity to point this out while I can: Major League Baseball’s Wild Card system is unfair. A lot of times it works out fine and good teams wind up in the playoffs, and certainly it makes for some exciting pennant races, plus there’s always a lot of randomness at play anyway.

But the idea of rewarding the non-division winner with the best record doesn’t really make sense so long as the clubs play unbalanced schedules. Those Cardinals get to play the bulk of their games against the Astros, Brewers, Cubs and Pirates, four teams toiling well below .500.

And yet St. Louis is only a half game better than the Rockies in the Wild Card race, even though Colorado regularly squares off with the Giants, Dodgers and Padres, all of whom are above .500.

The example isn’t perfect because the Cardinals are only 31-29 against the N.L. Central, so it’s not like they’ve coasted into playoff contention by dominating their weak opponents. But then, what would their record be if they faced the rigors of playing in any other division?

It strikes me that you can have an unbalanced schedule or a Wild Card, but you probably shouldn’t have both. I don’t imagine this system is going anywhere so maybe I’m just an old man yelling at clouds, but to me it doesn’t seem like it would be too hard to come up with a better one.

A while back I suggested (twice, actually) that the whole “Year of the Pitcher” thing might have something to do with the league-wide pitching talent finally catching up to the number of teams after expansions in 1993 and 1998, among other things.

So I imagine Major League Baseball could jumpstart offenses a bit by expanding to 32 clubs and giving each league four four-team divisions, eliminating the Wild Card.

Some would argue that shaking up the divisions would destroy certain rivalries, since in that model perhaps the Mets would no longer play the Braves, boohoo. But extant rivalries would intensify and new rivalries would develop.

Another potential downside would be the possibility that teams in each division run away with it and there’s not much meaningful baseball in September. But that’s basically happening in the American League this year anyway. Unless the White Sox manage to make a run in the Central, the only compelling race in the Junior Circuit is which A.L. East team wins the division and which takes the Wild Card.

A nice additional benefit to expansion could be the possibility that it would make the players’ union more amenable to some kind of salary cap or a more punitive luxury tax system to prevent the Yankees from doing what they do, which seems to piss people off so much. The Mets annually show us that there’s no strict correlation between payroll and winning, but I suppose it wouldn’t hurt the game to level the playing field a bit.

And I don’t know about that stuff and I haven’t thought it all the way through. I just know that if the Cardinals manage to scrap out the Wild Card this year, it’s kind of a travesty given how much harder the haul has been for the teams in the other N.L. divisions.

I realize, of course, that lots of things about baseball aren’t fair and that random events like that are a big part of the game, but I do feel the onus should be on the league to make everything as equitable as possible.

So generally, nerdy baseball fans like me put Rangers GM Jon Daniels on the type of pedestal reserved for gentlemen like Theo Epstein and Billy Beane and Brian Cashman. One of us, we say, and we defend even his questionable moves.

His acquisition of Jeff Francoeur, even, is defensible. Through Frenchy was the worst regular right fielder in baseball, Daniels doesn’t intend to use him as an everyday right fielder, which cuts to the core of the difference between the Rangers and Mets. I’m not convinced Frenchy is the absolute best right-handed bench bat out there, but he’s got some value in that role. Just like Alex Cora’s got some value as a scrap-heap middle infield contingency plan, and decidedly not as a multi-million dollar free-agent signing.

But I will also allow another possibility: Daniels grew up a Mets fan in Queens. So I’m open to the slim chance that he manages his Rangers like a business but still secretly roots for the Mets like a WFAN-calling, David Wright-booing fan who worships Cora’s leadership and thinks Frenchy’s got all the potential in the world and is finally going to turn it around soon now that he’s got a new approach.

So when he is faced with the opportunity to acquire one of those players, he is unable to suppress the Mets fan inside. He saddles his team with Alex Cora and Jeff Francoeur because he has spent the last two years convincing himself that they’re winning players, gritty hustlers who will lead the Mets to greatness.

One of us!

Just a theory.