And Now, The Tournament Begins

In case you thought the 2013 baseball season is over, the Rangers and Rays beg to differ. They will battle tonight in Arlington for the right to fly to Cleveland and challenge the Indians Wednesday for the opportunity to fly to Boston and face a rested Red Sox team Friday with their best pitcher (and possibly second best) unavailable.

On Tuesday, the Pirates and Reds will join the fray. Earning one of the Wild Card berths is certainly a substantial achievement, but the euphoria gives way to disappointment with jarring speed for the loser of the play-in game.

Only then does the tournament begin. Like hockey, baseball does not have a championship; it has a tournament in which a team's regular-season exploits are largely meaningless and the results essentially random. Hockey's playoffs are doubly disconnected because they are open to half the league, including the disappointments, the rebuilders and the inconsistent. In baseball, at least, only the best teams are afforded opportunities to compete for the title.

Still, only three of the last 17 World Champions have had baseball's best record over the 162-game season, while five Wild Cards have won the title.  

You will hear ad naseum (actually, hearing this once is ad naseum, because it's patently false) that teams need to have "momentum" or a "hot hand" or simply be playing well entering the playoffs in order to emerge victorious. This shibboleth is repeated despite the 2006 World Series in which both teams (St. Louis and Detroit) entered with sub-.500 second-half records. The Tigers were swept in the season's final series by last-place KC to drop into the Wild Card. The Cardinals lost seven in a row the week before the playoffs commenced.

Last season, the eventual champs fell behind in the best-of-five division series two games to none before storming back, then dropped four of five in the NLCS before sweeping the remaining three games. That's not so much "hot" or "cold" as random.

In fact, research shows that there is almost no correlation at all between playing well at season's end and winning it all. Indeed, there's little correlation between anything and playoff magic, which is why the playoffs are both a lottery and impossible to predict except by dumb luck.

When the Rays and Rangers tussle tonight in their loser-go-home affair, both teams will enter the series "hot" and "cold." Texas lost its grip on the division and then the Wild Card by dropping 12 of 13 in the waning weeks of the season. In the final week, they rebounded for six wins in a row. Tampa Bay charged to the top of the Wild Card standings with a seven-game win streak before losing a pair that dropped them into a tie with Texas. One of these teams will survive and will thus be dubbed, ex post facto, on a roll. If you're a betting person, caveat emptor.

Except for the Cardinals, every team is at least six years from a championship and has suffered at least one indignity since. After St. Louis (2011) and Boston (2007), the most recent champion city is Atlanta (1995), followed by Cincinnati (1990), Oakland (1989), L.A. (1988), Detroit (1984), Pittsburgh (1979) and Cleveland (1948). Texas and Tampa Bay have never tasted the sweet fruit of victory. So for all but Cards and Red Sox fans, a World Championship would be a refreshing novelty. 

Let's go all of them!