There once was a baseball team that won 116 games, outscored its opponents by 323 runs, finished first by 20 games and lost in the postseason to a team with a winning percentage 147 points worse. None of its fans went on the Internet to decry the unfairness of the result.
There once was a baseball team that won 111 games, had the fifth-best winning percentage ever and was swept in the postseason by a team with a winning percentage 91 points worse. None of its fans called up the local sports-talk radio show to complain about the arbitrary nature of the playoff system.
There once was a baseball team that won 116 games, scored 300 runs more than its opponents, finished first by 14 games and lost in the postseason in five games to a team that had a winning percentage 122 points worse. None of its fans took to tweeting about how the postseason setup failed to reward the teams that deserve it.
Upsets happen, though there are a lot of folks, including more than one published in the Los Angeles Times, who thought the 2022 Los Angeles Dodgers should be immunized against them. The aforementioned teams, the 1906 Chicago Cubs, 1954 Cleveland Indians and 2001 Seattle Mariners, respectively, know better.
“If there ever was a case for canceling the playoffs and awarding a championship to one team because it was so clearly better than all the others, the 2022 Los Angeles Dodgers would be it,” wrote an opinion columnist in the Times, not long before the San Diego Padres, 22 games worse than the Dodgers over the regular season, canceled the NL West champion’s playoffs.
I’m not sure to what degree sarcasm was the aim of that piece, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t for Bill Plaschke when he penned the following: “(The Dodgers) have flopped before, countless wonderful summers cruelly melted into autumn ashes. But they’ve never blown it like this. They have been embarrassed before, many memorable summer marches ruined by staggering October stumbles. But they’ve never been humiliated like this. Barely a week after setting a franchise record with 111 regular-season victories, the biggest winners in Dodgers history have blundered into a vastly different moniker. The Biggest Losers.”
And Mets fans thought they were moping after losing in the playoffs to the Padres.
It’s almost as if the Dodgers didn’t exist before moving across the country. If we’re talking humiliation, you’d think losing a 13-game lead with 48 games to play, and a 4-1 lead in the ninth inning of Game 3 of the playoffs might qualify. Not that the 1951 Dodgers deserved it (the Giants cheated and deserved all the venom the modern Astros get). We can only imagine how Plaschke would’ve reacted, or overreacted, in print to Bobby Thomson’s homer.
Give Plaschke credit for this. He made it through a thousand or more words without once blaming Yasiel Puig.
Baseball seasons are long, arduous, treks, 162 games long and six months in duration; the playoffs are short, sudden and random. The Dodgers, like the Mets, deserve credit for the success of the former, not degradation for the failure of the latter. You don’t get to time your slumps.
ESPN’s Buster Olney tweeted: “A way to greatly reduce the complaining about the postseason format: Let the respective No. 1 seeds design their paths. Allow them to choose a bye or not (and ALL would take the bye), and then pick the two other playoff teams to be on their side of the bracket. That would be fun.”
Here’s a better way to reduce the complaining: mock it as Phillies fans did the Braves’ tomahawk chop while their team was finishing off the defending World Series champions, no matter that they finished 14 games behind them.
The Braves, who won just 88 games before storming to last year’s World Series title, were in no position to complain about the system.
Major League Baseball has spent much of its history extolling the sanctity of the regular season, as if it put its sport on some higher moral plane than all those others with playoffs that were open houses. It’s understandable, perhaps, that a good many people who follow MLB and promote it have difficulty accepting what’s become of its postseason, that it’s just another knock off in search of a bigger and better upset, a larger audience and more coin for its product.
“All the suggested changes to the postseason format that I have seen start from an erroneous premise,” tweeted baseball writer Joe Sheehan. “That MLB gives a crap about the competition. The format we have, and any that may follow, has one purpose, maximizing national-television money that gets shared 30 ways.”
Sheehan is so correct that even umpires who routinely call strikes balls and balls strikes should be able to see it clearly (the reform movement is better off using its energy to enact changes with umpires; the automatic strike zone can’t get here soon enough and would do more to ensure postseason equity than changing the playoff system).
Baseball is fighting daily to maintain interest. A long slog of a pennant race does little to do that when the Dodgers win the NL West by 22 games. The last season of two pennant winners going to the World Series was 1968. The Cardinals won the National League by nine games, led by as many as 15 on August 1 and started September 13 games ahead. The Tigers won the American League by 12 games, and though their lead was as little as four games on August 27, it was seven games on September 1 and double figures two weeks later.
Does anyone think those kinds of pennant races were good for baseball? (It also was the Year of the Pitcher. If you think offense is bad now, and it is, know that the OPS for 2022 is 67 points higher than it was in 1968, .706-.639).
The sacredness of the regular season is backed up by the canard that it determines the best team. That’s a nice concept but totally arbitrary. Who determines who the best team is? When does it matter who the best team is? Why should a team that was better in May gain deference for it in October?
Remember when the Yankees were 60-23 and on their way to being one of the greatest teams ever? The Yankees finished the season 39-40. How do we judge them?
The Padres were 12 games behind the Dodgers at the beginning of August. Then they added Juan Soto, Josh Bell, Brandon Drury and Josh Hader. The Phillies were 10 games behind the Mets at the beginning of August. Then they swung deals for a centerfielder (Brad Marsh), a fifth starter (Noah Syndergaard) and a reliever (David Robertson), all areas of need.
The Padres and Phillies of October/November aren’t the Padres and Phillies of April-July. How long do we grade them by that outdated standard? If you’re going to admit wild-card teams to the postseason party, you can’t be shocked when they misbehave.
The two teams playing for the National League pennant finished a combined 36 games out of first place, and one of them finished 14 games out of second place. That’s novel. So is the hysteria that’s greeted the teams with the fifth- and sixth- best records playing for one of two berths in the World Series.
Perhaps that’s because the teams upset include the 101-win New York Mets, 111-win Los Angeles Dodgers and defending champion 101-win Atlanta Braves, who once had a national following on TBS. Perhaps that’s the anticipation on Madison Avenue on what the ratings would be for a Guardians-Padres World Series.
Because these kinds of upsets aren’t new. The 82-win Mets beat the 99-win Reds to win the 1973 NL pennant. The 116-win Cubs lost the 1906 World Series to the 93-win White Sox, the 111-win Indians were swept in the 1954 World Series by the 97-win Giants, the 116-win Mariners lost the 2001 ALCS to the 95-win Yankees. The 83-win Cardinals won the World Series in 2006.
(The regular-season success of the 2001 Mariners will always amaze me. Jamie Moyer won 20 games. Aaron Sele was 15-5, Paul Abbott, who was 26-33 for the other 10 seasons of his career, was 17-4 with a 4.25 ERA. John Halama won 10 games. How?)
In the 27 seasons since the wild-cards were introduced, only six times has the team with the best regular-season record won the World Series, and two of those were tied (2018 Red Sox, 2016 Cubs, 2009 and 1998 Yankees; the 2013 and 2007 Red Sox were tied). More wild-card teams — seven — have won the World Series than teams with the best record (1997 and 2003 Marlins, 2004 Red Sox, 2002 Angels, 2011 Cardinals, 2014 Giants and 2019 Angels).
Seven-for-27 is a .259 batting average for the wild card, or 46 points higher than those of batters in this year’s postseason through Sunday, according to Joe Posnanski. Six other wild-card teams have lost the World Series (2000 Mets, 2002 Giants, 2005 Astros, 2006 Tigers, 2007 Rockies, 2014 Royals).
In 2002 we had an all wild-card World Series between the Angels and Giants and it didn’t get nearly the vitriol this year’s postseason has. Perhaps that’s because a World Series between the Twins, whom the Angels defeated in the ALCS, and the Diamondbacks, who won 98 games and finished three games ahead of the Giants, was an alternative. (The Royals and Giants, in 2014, was another all wild-card World Series. Like the Giants and Angels it went seven games and was pretty good.)
The National League team in the World Series this seaon will be a wild card, and it won’t be so bad. It’ll be a lot better for the sport than millions of TV viewers tuning in to hear one team’s fans doing an infernal and ignominious chant.
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