Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig has not attended baseball's December winter meetings for the last decade or so, unlike the times when, traditionally, the sitting commissioner gave something of a 'state of baseball" address.

But next week Selig will be in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., site of this year's gathering of major league and minor league personnel, for a couple of meetings of his own — one of them involving his prized 14-member committee for baseball's "on-field" affairs.

That committee, which includes Cardinals manager Tony La Russa and club Chairman Bill DeWitt Jr., will get together Tuesday at a location Selig said he hoped would provide "peace and quiet," from the noisiness of most winter meetings activities. Among items on the agenda are any expansion of the instant replay system, which was employed infrequently in postseason play this year, and expansion of the number of teams qualifying for postseason play.

The first item isn't likely to change for the foreseeable future, and Selig is on record as saying he doesn't yet see the need for expansion of instant replay, which currently covers boundary and fair or foul calls on potential home runs.

The second item — a 10-team playoff field — has a very real chance of being recommended next week and probably would be implemented in 2012, when, presumably, a new labor agreement would be in place. The existing one expires on Dec. 31 of next year.

Selig, speaking to the Post-Dispatch by telephone from his Milwaukee offices, said that if the playoff formula is expanded by one more wild-card team in each league, giving each league five playoff representatives, it almost surely couldn't be approved and put into place for next season.

And, though he clearly seems in favor of it, Selig isn't guaranteeing that the process will change at all.

"We've got work to do on it," he said. "Nothing's ever for sure.

"Two or three years ago, I had myself convinced we were going forward (with more playoff teams), but then we backed up a little bit."

It was Selig who instituted the wild-card concept in the first place. It actually would have started in 1994 but for the players' strike that canceled postseason play. Since each league had been split into three divisions at that stage, there were eight total playoff teams rather than the four-team format (two in each league) that had existed since 1969.

"Eight is all right," Selig said. "You'll remember the abuse I took way back when. I got ripped and torn apart, and it was pretty bad. But it's worked out great, everybody would admit. Really, 10 (teams) is not a bad number."

Even at 10 out of 30, baseball would have the lowest percentage of teams qualifying for postseason play among the four major pro sports. Sixteen teams out of 30 qualify in both the National Basketball Association and National Hockey League and 12 out of 32 in the National Football League.

A first-round playoff between the two wild-card teams in each league could take two forms — either a one-game shootout or, more likely, a two-out-of-three series.

The three division winners would gain the advantage of having at least a couple of more days off to set their rotations, but a further round of playoffs would extend the season toward or into November again.

Major League Baseball has moved up the start of next season so that all teams are starting in March, and thus there would be no postseason games in November, a month in which Selig does not want to have baseball played.

"I'm very sensitive about that," he said. "You always want to do the right things. But I don't want to go into November."

The options would be to shorten the regular season, or start it even earlier. Selig, in October, said he didn't think the owners would go for anything less than 162 playing dates and the days of the doubleheader are gone, unless a number of 'split," or day-night doubleheaders, was scheduled.

Any change recommended by Selig's panel would have to be approved by the owners and then the players' association.

An extra round of playoffs for a wild-card entrant, though, might reduce the chances of a wild-card club making the World Series, which has happened far more often in the last decade than Selig probably figured. Since 2002, seven wild-card teams have reached the World Series, with three successive wild-card winners from 2002-04 in Anaheim, Florida and Boston.