The best second-place team in the history of the National League was the 1993 San Francisco Giants. That's a declarative statement about a debatable point, but it's made with this in mind: The team that finishes second in this year's National League West might be able to stake a claim for that crown.
The problem, if you see it as a problem, is that, whether it's the Giants or the Los Angeles Dodgers, one of these two high-powered clubs, who have owned the two-best winning percentages in baseball for much of the season, is going to have to play a coin-flip, anything-can-happen, winner-take-all wild-card game. How unjust.
That's one way to look at it. The other is to consider this stretch run between two ancient rivals as a feature, not a bug, of the current playoff format. When you do, you can spend the next two-plus weeks reveling in a great race, rather than stewing over a perceived injustice that is nothing but a byproduct of the contemporary mindset about sports.
This feature is not only not a bug, but we should all rejoice that it exists.