Okay, So I Might Have Been Wrong

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.

Top Sports Hypocricies of 2015

Major college and professional sports are presented to us by the leagues, the schools and their broadcast partners as noble competitions that distinguish the emotionally tough from the emotionally indomitable. While that is often an element of the games, what characterizes every single major sports contest is the pursuit of money, and ever more of it.

Money underlies the raging hypocrisies that gird our most popular sports today. Let's look at the big one:

1. The NCAA -- A fraud wrapped in a lie engulfed in a sham. The so-called "student athletes" competing in major college football and basketball are often functionally illiterate young men forced to support their sponsors' lies about high school "graduations" and  class "attendance" at major American research universities-- until the moment they are released to seek recompense for their labors. Everyone involved in the games -- except the NCAA, of course -- refers to their trade in work terms, such as coaches demanding that players "do their jobs." For this, athletes from low-income families not only get nothing of value (a university education is worthless to someone at a fifth-grade reading level) but are prohibited from earning income by working side jobs. Heck, they can't even get a free ride home from a coach or a fan.

2. The NFL and domestic violence -- Beat your girlfriend mercilessly behind closed doors; serve a short suspension and then sign a lucrative contract. Punch your now-wife once on video and earn the endless enmity of humankind, not to mention an effective lifetime ban from the game. And how about the NFL puking all over itself on the issue, initially all-but dismissing the incident, then over-reacting and violating the policy it had literally just written.

3. Hoopla about the NBA (and NHL, among those who care) regular seasons -- which are as meaningful as clown candidate policy pronouncements. Here are the conference playoff seedings of the last seven Stanley Cup Champions -- 4-6-1-8-3-2-4. Media coverage of these games would have you believe that teams are straining to win every contest down the stretch for the highest seed possible, when in fact they are trying to avoid strains so that their players are healthy for the two-month marathon that actually determines the champion.

4. The brainless patriotism attending the Olympics, World Cup, Rider Cup and Davis Cup -- Nothing swells our USA pride like millionaire professionals from the States defeating amateur Angolan hoopsters. Take that, ISIS!

5. Our varied responses to cheating in different sports -- In NASCAR, if you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'. That was the credo of the most beloved driver ever. In football, we could hardly care less who's juicing. In basketball there's an overt understanding that the rules are more lenient for big stars. But in baseball, the Wrath of God is unleashed upon those who take substances that make them better players.

6. Gambling laws -- After 30+ years of asking, I have yet to hear a coherent, much less convincing, argument supporting the prohibition. It's particularly indefensible that the laws are so gauzy that gambling is actually quite encouraged by law, except when it's not.

7.The anti-geek crowd -- Employing mostly red herring arguments, they dismiss the advances made to baseball analysis that have been adopted by every Major League organization and rely instead on old stats they're comfortable with but were discredited nearly 40 years ago.

8. The geek crowd -- Make no mistake, there's plenty of culpability on that side of the ledger too.The stat guys are starting to learn the algorithm for humility and it's about time. Their differential equations offer a 5% edge in a game where swings come in 20% packages.

The NBA Exists As A Cautionary Tale for MLB

Commenting on the loss of star guard Derrick Rose, a leading NBA analyst asserted that the Chicago Bulls could no longer challenge for the Eastern Conference crown. He noted that despite a terrific coach and some very good players, Chicago could not compete with the two Eastern powers -- the Miami Heat and Indiana Pacers.

So, 15 games into an 82-game marathon, 13 of 15 teams in the East are simply playing out the string with no hope of a championship. That notion is borne out by this: Miami and Indiana are the only two squads with more wins than losses in their conference, and they're 26-4 between them.

On the other side of the ledger, five teams have won two-thirds or more of their contests. The Western Conference appears to these inexpert eyes to be more wide open. Still, if the competition is merely among those five, as many suggest, 10 others are simply jockeying for draft position.

And yet, they will play 1000 more NBA regular-season games over four months and then begin an interminable playoff season, in which nine of the 16 contenders -- some two of whom must advance to the second round -- haven't a prayer.

That is why the NBA regular season, and the first round of their playoffs, are irrelevant, and can only be considered interesting by those willing to suspend disbelief about the futility facing most fan bases. It seems pretty clear that God put the NBA on this planet as a cautionary tale for Major League Baseball. I hope the next commissioner heeds it.

MLB Staying True To The Game

The NBA and NHL are turning the ignition on their playoffs, which is always a good time for baseball. These two leagues have taken wonderful sports and diluted them to the point of irrelevance, a vivid contrast to baseball.

It's interesting too how basketball and hockey are so far apart on the playoff loop that they're in the same place. In the NBA, half the teams make the playoffs, but only four or five have any realistic chance of winning the championship. It makes the final weeks of the season and the first few rounds of the playoffs largely meaningless.

Hockey's just the opposite. There's little correlation between regular season performance and Stanley Cup results, meaning any team that makes the tournament has a realistic shot if its goalie gets hot. (The top regular season team in the league has never won the Cup in the expanded playoff format.) Since seeding is insignificant, so is most of the season. The only part of the regular season that matters in the NHL is the last two weeks as middle feeders battle for the final playoff spots. Ironically, the sports media seems to stop paying what little attention they give hockey at just that point.

As we inaugurate the baseball season, who's a playoff lock? The Yankees, Sox and Rays have to contend with each other. The Cubs look like a good bet, but so did Enron. And who's playing for honorable mention? The Pirates, Padres and Nationals to be sure, and I wouldn't want my life to depend on the Mariners, Orioles, Blue Jays or Astros either. Nonetheless, each of them has a better shot than the #8 seeds in the NBA playoffs, who have to beat Cleveland and L.A. respectively.

It's another feather to add to Bud Selig's hat. Most baseball fans think of him as Bozo the Commissioner, but there's a lot to be said for avoiding the temptation to rob Peter's regular season to pay Paul's playoffs. Have fun NBA and NHL, and let me know when you're done.

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