If you're over a certain age, you remember the nation coming to a halt during the World Series.
It was the best team from the National League battling the best team from the American League for the championship.
Willie Mays against Mickey Mantle.
Bob Gibson and Carl Yastzremski.
The Big Red Machine versus the Bronx Bombers.
Teams that didn't know each other squaring off not just for team supremacy but for league bragging rights. The DH league versus the pure league. The senior circuit against the upstarts. Natural grass or (God help us) turf.
Baseball was the national pastime then. Even as football was eclipsing it in popularity, it maintained an exalted place on the sports map.
It's just a different time now.
- Baseball is a sport of regional interest more than national interest, so millions of Americans don't watch if their team is not involved.
- Eliminating most league distinctions has reduced league partisanship that once fed World Series interest.
- Inter-league play and movement of players through free agency have sapped the Series of its fascination.
- Multiple divisions and Wild Cards have drawn out the post-season into a month of games and added a randomness to the final match-up, which sometimes leads to mediocre teams playing for the title.
- Playoffs have pushed the Series so late into the Fall that the weather is often unacceptable for baseball.
For the most part, these are unfortunate side effects of necessary changes. But it means the World Series will never again hold the nation in thrall.
So, How I Was Wrong
This was not my starting point when I bemoaned the addition of a third division in each league and the introduction of the Wild Card. I wanted the best teams in the World Series. Fewer playoff slots don't yield fewer races; they yield races that have more urgency.
The truth though is that baseball has found that sweet spot. The current set-up offers half the fan bases a rooting interest while also keeping the bar reasonably high for entrance into the tournament. And it disadvantages the weaker teams that sneak in.
This year's AL Wild Card race has turned into a seven-team mud-wrestling tournament. With 45 games to go, half the league is within 2.5 games of a ticket to October. Without the Wild Card, Houston, Washington and Los Angeles would be galloping away with pennant dreams, leaving Boston, Cleveland and New York in the one playoff race.
I'm coming to appreciate 10 playoff spots, even as I'm offended by teams like the '03 Marlins and (especially) the '06 Cardinals dogpiling in the end. I would like to see the team with the league's best record afforded a greater advantage in their series against the surviving Wild Card -- like all the games at home. There is something objectionable about a team with 87 wins riding a couple of favorable bounces to four victories out of seven against an opponent 15 games better during the season.
But something else has changed that makes that objection nearly moot: the playoffs are no longer an extension of the season; they are a separate event. As we've seen, teams alter their make-up specifically for the post-season. The attributes of a great regular season team don't apply in the tournament -- and every team knows that going in.
It's a New Era
In Seattle right now, and Anaheim, and the Metroplex, the Twin Cities, Tampa Bay and western Missouri, people can still get excited about their nine despite 115 games of abject mediocrity and a 15-game deficit in their division.
And there's something to be said for that.
Let's just hope the best teams survive the gauntlet and square off come Halloween.
Think about packing a box to send a birthday gift to a friend. It has six sides, all of them solid. We want to fill the box as much as possible to maximize the gift.
We're going to place stacks of flat objects in the box that nearly fill it. Then we're going to squish some fist-sized items the consistency of bean bags into the box. They can be molded to any shape but they still take up room. We're running out of room, but we can tear open a couple of those bean bags and disperse most of the beads before tying back up the bag and stuffing it inside.
Man, we really want to cram more stuff in there. It's a flat fee for shipping, so the more we get in, the better the value. But the box is groaning at the seams. In fact, some of the bean bags are poking above the fold. We'll tape it up best we can. It's pretty jerry-rigged.
We could just bring the gifts to our friend but it wouldn't be the same. Every year since forever we have been shipping a box of goodies and it's a nice tradition we want to keep. We could send fewer gifts too, but that's another great tradition.
And that is the baseball's dilemma in a nutshell, or a box.
Baseball is stuck on a 162-game schedule because it's been that way for 54 years. There's nothing magic about 162 games; in fact, with the elimination of double-headers, they don't really fit between harvests in Northern climes with the populations to support Major League teams. They shouldn't be playing baseball in New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee or plenty of other MLB cities in early April or October, particularly at night. But they must. A more sensible 140-game schedule is a non-starter, like Republicans acknowledging that they don't understand science.
So the season spans the months that can barely support a warm-weather sport, and then the playoffs begin and stretch into November, at night, often in places whose winters are debuting. World Series games in those cities are deplorable nonsense. The box is stretched beyond its limit.
Beyond that, baseball has encountered another conundrum. Fans turn tail when their home nine is eliminated in August. It makes for a soul-crushing season and induces them to turn their attention to their alma mater's minor league football team. With the number of baseball teams doubling since 1960, they want more opportunities to get into the post-season tournament. We need to fit ever more into the box.
But the game reveals itself only through the long slog of the season. Any cellar dweller can rattle off a week's worth of wins; any pennant contender can slip up over half-a-fortnight. The tournament, though sometimes enthralling, has lost its ability to determine the "best" team. It merely asserts a champion, whose crown fetches diminishing amounts on ebay.
For the first 68 years of the previous century, the two league winners competed unencumbered by "playoffs" for the World Series crown, with the victor reasonably claiming superiority over all. For another couple of decades, the league split into divisions and each World Series team was forced to defeat its foe from across the Mississippi to earn a slot in the championship. That led to some questionable World Series opponents, but still, they had won a segment of the marathon.
And then the Wild Card, and the playoffs devolved into a series of coin flips. So the regular season is more thrilling but the race to the championship is dishwater. The last teams in are winning the tournament with disturbing regularity. Moreover, the post-season has begun to tear the sides of the box.
To counteract the playoff success of the Wild Card, MLB gave it a twin and ordered a sudden-death play-in. Even more value to the fans and a sense of advantage to the division winners. Alas, the box cannot expand any more.
There is time for but one game, a winner-take-all. It's that last bean bag, drained of most of its beads. The drama builds but the fairness declines.
After the 98-win Pirates succumbed to Jake Arrieta Wednesday night, voices rose again about extending the play-in to at least three games. But the calendar is inflexible. And so Baseball is pushing up against all six sides of the box. It wants more games than the calendar will hold. It wants more teams in the playoffs but that dilutes the championship. Short playoff series accommodate the seasons but eliminate the best teams more often. Longer series present the opposite dilemma.
The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
And under-girding the entire enterprise is the constant drumbeat of economics, which is never satisfied with too much and must always demand more, more, more. And so the box is splitting and the sensible course of action -- remove some of the contents -- cannot be considered.
That is the injustice of the one-game play-in. And it is not going away.
It's May 14. The concept in force remains "small sample size." Yet already, 35 games into the season, logic prevails:
Division Leaders
Atlanta Braves
St. Louis Cardinals
San Francisco Giants
New York Yankees
Detroit Tigers
Texas Rangers
Wild Cards
Cincinnati Reds
Arizona Diamondbacks
Baltimore Orioles
Boston Red Sox
Other than the conspicuous absence of the Nationals, would any of this be shocking at year's end? All six division winners made the playoffs last year. So did two of the four Wild Cards. There doesn't appear to be a 2012 Cleveland, 2011 Pittsburgh or 2010 Baltimore here that takes off with a gallop and pulls up lame at the three-quarter pole.
Let's delve deeper. Here's the bottom of the standings:
Last place teams
Toronto Blue Jays
Chicago White Sox
Houston Astros
Miami Marlins
Chicago Cubs
Los Angeles Dodgers
Not a single 2012 playoff team. We like to think of Toronto as a favorite, but the 2012 version lost 89 games and the imports arrived with plenty of downside everywhere but on the payroll. Someone has to bring up the rear in the AL East.
L.A. will almost certainly switch places with the Padres, who are better equipped for the cellar. As for Chicago, well, let's hope the Blackhawks can parlay the NHL's best record into a Stanley Cup run.
It would be interesting to research how long it takes for Major League team records to coalesce around their natural state. In 2013, it looks like 30 games is about that point.
