The expanded playoffs help the cheap teams maintain an excuse to be cheap, but it doesn’t change that they have the capability to spend far more yet choose not to.
It's the same way ESPN treats the Yankees and Red Sox. They're just throwing their weight behind their favorites, to hell with what everybody else thinks.
The insanity of doing this in a city as full of artists and as photogenic as Chicago. You could just take a cell phone picture and throw some text over top of it!