Up and Åtta | If MLB's playoff system is this unserious, then have some serious fun with it.
Or, how to stop persisting in being a purist, and learn to like the Mets' messiness, the Padres' desperation, the subtext in a Royals-Yankees series, and the notion of an Ohtanilorean.
Writing off of: the start of the ‘eighth-finals’ in the Major League Baseball playoffs; or, how to get past being in the last generation that remembers when the regular season mattered. The two AL series are 1-0 for the division winners; the two NL series are tied 1-1.
(As so often happens, this is a long post. Click the title to read in a browser.)
When the end seemed nigh for the Mets, righty slugger Pete Alonso cracked a three-run home run off all-star closer Devin Williams, putting his team over the Brewers in a do-or-done playoff game.
Three nights later, when a Philly crowd was so quiet the crowd mics could pick up the sound of hands unclasping, Bryce Harper had the trained reaction to deliver that same théâtre. A near-triple digit fastball but came too close, and Harper hit the adrenalin shot.
Then there are the San Diego Padres, playing desperate hockey. The Padres would already be a beckoning bandwagon just based on how they strive to carve out a fanbase in a corner of California, have funky uniforms, and have had enough beloved stars with tragic lives to fill the cast of a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. Perhaps they deserve one just for the sole reason that this month is the 20th anniversary of the death of Ken Caminiti, the all-out third baseman and leader of the 1998 Padres pennant winner who unburdened himself about doping in the sport.
One could get prolix further pointing out current Padres third baseman, Manny Machado, pulled everyone in when L.A. fans threw debris on the field on Sunday. Same position.
The regular season has become mostly wallpaper now that baseball has morphed fully into a playoff sport. It is easy to feel blaséd-out.
Those moments illustrated how October baseball still has it. Great théâtre, where one clear-winner confrontation always survives whatever the storms of optimization and rent-seeking wreak on baseball. The gameplay issues still show up, but they get glossed.
Going back to Pete Alonso’s series-winning home run for a second, all the stakes were clear. While MLB seems to get more and more derivative of other sports, this was the classic layered-levelled resolution it does so well. Alonso is like the NHL 40-goal scorer, or NBA/WNBA guard who is expected to deliver. He also had to put some NFL kicker English on it to take Williams’ 3-and-1 changeup on the outer half of the plate out to right field.
It seemed awesome. Soon there was a reminder that this is all prelims.
‘So what did they win?’
Uh. Funny you should ask.
All the Mets won was the equivalent of a First Four game in the NCAA Tournament. The tell is that even pro announcers stumbling over the 4-letter term for the next round: and so the Mets are off to the NLCS, er, NLDS.
For someone old enough to remember when the postseason was just four teams, who all won a mini-pennant, there is a stubbornness. But perspective gets longer, so, the self-taker is get with the network programmers, Sager. The corporate product must graft on another round, another window box.
Fanning healthfully means only taking it as seriously as it deserves to be taken seriously.
As a Blue Jays diehard, seeing them go two-and-out in the first stage of the 2020, ’22 and ’23 playoffs was unaffecting. It only hurts when the Jays, or my NFL team, the Minnesota Vikings, get to the final four or, delulu much, the championship.
The slow-build Marathon, not a Sprint ethos had its day, from 1903 to ’93. It is impossible to explain what it was like to someone under 35 that your beloveds could post 96 wins, be out front, then wind up as the best second-place team.
In the present, the worry is that baseball has moved the sliders too far in the direction of randomizing. Who was healthy, and hot at the right time. It is clear the regular season is “just get in.” There is a fog about what matters during the 162-game regseason. Crapshoots defeat cogency.
Are coastal behemoth teams coasting since they know they just have to finish first? This season, four teams lost 99 or more games, but only the Shohei Ohtani-Mookie Betts Dodgers won 98 and played >.600 ball.
There are so many notorious NFT (Not ’FFin Trying) teams that, shockingly, Commissioner Rob Manfred did not see the partnership opportunity in 2022. You know them:
John Fisher and the Athletics, who plan to cook players on turf in Sacramento;
Bob Nutting and the Pirates are consistently 29th in payroll;
the unaired Succession season where Arte Moreno’s adult kids play “Not it!” with who has to run the Angels;
Charles Monfort and Dick Monfort and the Rockies, whose have been so bad that one has to check to see how their winning percentage in the 2020s, .407, comps with the short-lived NHL Colorado Rockies (.325);
Whatever Florida Man decided ’tis better for the Marlins to be a 100-loss team with a male, millennial GM than it is to be a squeak-in playoff team with Kim Ng, who got her first baseball job over 30 years ago;
And the White Sox, whose 41-121 record is the clear worst by a non-expansion team since the end of the Second World War. At least the 120-loss Mets in 1962 had the excuse for being a new franchise.
The White Sox were free money for contenders. They went 7-46 against the three AL wild-card earners, the Orioles, Royals, and Tigers, and the AL’s ‘first two out,’ the Mariners and Twins. They were 3-18 (.143) against the seven NL playoff teams with at least 89 wins.1
The third win is a Sale unto itself.2 What it means is up to the receiver of the tale. It involves Atlanta lefty ace Chris Sale winning a pitching Triple Crown, a bit of climate rebellion.
How to narrow down? Build up from the standings column headed L10, for a team’s record in its past 10 games. It is too small of a sample size.
How about F45 (freshest 45) and P90X (past 90 exposures). Meaningful games only. So results against the White Sox, Rockies (61-101) and Marlins (62-100), should be binned.
Make of it what you will.
A math major would figure out how to weight portions of the season, and adjust for attrition. But this is what TV needs to show, if we are to recover some semblance of coherence.
Anyway, instead of the ALDS/NLDS/ALCS/NLCS confusion-by-abbreviation. BASEketball called it. The wild-card round is just a weeder course; one arbitrary pass-fail test that says a 90-win season was worthless.
Then do as March Madness used to go — each division series is a regional, with a Dad Beer sponsorship. It would look something like this; the home-field advantage team is listed second.
AL
Labatt Blue™ Midwest Regional | Tigers vs. Guardians (up 1-0)
Ballpark2Ballpark
Just 2½ hours of U.S. interstate driving, curling around Lake Erie.
Real talk and hidden stakes!
Another pitched battle over the future of pitcher usage. Closer nonpareil Emmanuel Clase led the Guardians to MLB’s best reliever ERA by more than a ½-run. The ’Ians had the 24th-ranked starting staff, which is odd for a 92-win team.
Tigers lefty Tarik Skubal won the traditional pitcher Triple Crown. The Tigers had an MLB-low 52.03 percent of their innings covered by starters. But it worked well enough for the Tigers to rank top-5 in starter and reliever ERA.
What is it about the Tigers?
They have the persona of a 1990s NFL wild-card playoff team that will ruin some playoff pools. The kind that would win with Bubby Brister behind centre. They are the youngest team in baseball. There are college football players older than some Tigers mainstays.
Riley Greene is their only everyday batter whose OPS+ scares anybody. They were ninth in runs scored, and ninth or lower in the AL in every batting-run scoring stat. But they finished first in triples, the pollinator of extra-base hits.
What is it about the Guardians?
There is always a real Did someone invent the bus again? reaction when someone writes this about the Guardians.
Guards Ball is a style of play. It’s also a mentality. Cleveland utility man David Fry coined the phrase early in the season when it was clear that this roster was one big collective pest for opponents. It’s the death-by-a-million-paper-cuts approach that prioritizes walks, base hits, elite baserunning, sacrifice bunts and flies and hustling so hard that it puts pressure on defenders for routine plays. (MLB.com, Oct. 5)
About that. The Guardians ranked sixth in the AL in home runs, and seventh in runs. Third baseman José Ramírez, since the start of the ’20 fakey COVID season, has averaged 35 home runs, 40 doubles, 30 steals, and 106 runs per 162 games. Those are not small-ball stats, but hey the CN Rail runs nonstop.3
A Whitey Herzog 1980s St. Louis Cardinals team, this ain’t. One time those wascally Whiteyballers went 99-62 and scored the most runs while being second-last in home runs. Truthfully, they probably went a bit far with it, but a play here or there and they win three World Series in six seasons with majority-Black everyday core players…
Possible Canadianness
And then, there are the Naylors. Cleanup-hitting first baseman Josh Naylor and primary catcher Bo Naylor are the Guardians’ fifth- and ninth-biggest contributing position players. Remember, if a team has Canadian players, you must cheer for that team, or your wireless bill goes up.
Josh Naylor fulfills a great Canadian baseball archetype: lefty-batting RBIfest enthusiast. He finishes off opportunities Ramírez creates, and puts up Joe Carter-like countin’ stats; take that however you please. The roots of Good Canadian RBI Man trace to Huntsville, Ont., in the early days of 1908.4 Bo Naylor is the Guardians’ primary catcher.
3 Speed Amsterdam™ Southeast Regional | Royals vs. Yankees (up 1-0)
Ballpark2Ballpark
It is just a 3-hour direct flight from the city with a legendary, one-of-a-kind ballpark you must see once… to the one with Yankee Stadium.
Real talk and hidden stakes!
Sure, it just looks like a best-of-5 series matching the No. 20 team in payroll vs. the No. 2 team in payroll, and you already know who is whom. Chances are, this is just a redux of all the times the Yankees and Twins have been pitted in an early-round series, and the Twins looked beaten by the fourth inning of Game 1.
Is there a link there? Well, Google Maps says the Twins’ ballpark and the Royals’ ballpark are about a 6½-hour drive, presuming no stops. It’s almost all on I-35.
But Royals-Yankees offers nuggets:
The Royals and Yankees need to hook up in October once in a while for a history lesson about baseball and North America’s Original Sin as it pertains to baseball. Remember, the timeline for Babe Ruth’s Yankee years and their empire-building is 1920-48.
Those match the recognized lifespan of Black-led major-league baseball and the Royals’ forebears, the Kansas City Monarchs. As the Yankees get Babe Ruth and begin empire-building, Rube Foster, C.I. Taylor, and white co-conspirators such as Monarchs founder J.L. Wilkinson work for an alternative. They saw baseball as a conduit to smooth out Great Migration tensions. The stress load probably put many of them into early graves.
The saddest what-if in baseball history is how it never had the forward thinking to (i) value the institutional knowledge of all the leagues that were not coded stale, pale, male, and New York-centric. Again, read Raceball by Rob Ruck. Or Michael Shapiro’s Bottom of the Ninth: Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball from Itself.
Quick version: Yankeedom is usually bad. However…Fact: the history of baseball is a history of money, and it is no accident that when the ballplayers make a collective gain, the Yankees usually reap the results. Egad, winning requires paying the talent.5
What is it about the Royals?
Mostly that 2-hitter/shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. is a five-star man. If there is any hope for this sport, he should have the only-one-team career George Brett had with the Royals, Robin Yount had with the Brewers, and Cal Ripken Jr. had with the Orioles.
Witt is the prototype shortstop. The position is rough on the flexors and obliques, and he was at the 6-spot for 97.6 percent of the Royals’ out-plays. He was pencilled into the 2-hitter spot, the critical path in run scoring, for 160 games in a row, and scored or batted in 27.5 percent of the Royals’ runs.
That is an all-rounder argument to be the MVP. Witt grades out at 9.4 WAR, second in MLB to the Yankees’ Aaron Judge. The Yankees, though, always have slugging outfielders.
Prior to Witt’s ascendance, a Kansas City team had played in the AL for 63 full seasons. Only one KC shortstop finished the season with 5.0 WAR or more, and you might not even remember he played for the Royals.6 The last shortstop for a major-league team in the city to produce like Witt has was 26-year-old Jackie Robinson with the 1945 Monarchs.
What is it about the Yankees?
The reach across history is hard to resist, even for a skeptic. But Aaron Judge and Juan Soto are possibly more better than Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris were in 1961. They got on base more against a deeper level of competition.
They are a fearsome pair. The franchise itself, not much. The Yankees are built to just to re-assemble the board for the next round.
NL
Moose Light™ East Regional | Mets vs. Phillies (tied 1-1)
Ballpark2Ballpark
You all seem eco-conscious, so it is just 3½ hours by bus from the bank-branded ballyard in South Philly to the bank-branded ballyard at Willets Point.
Real talk and hidden stakes!
Two very similar teams with an animus steeped in subtle differences and hating their neighbours. The Francisco Lindor-led Mets aspire to be a version of the Yankees that looks more like North America. The Phillies and Harper learned their baseball archetypes through the 2004 Red Sox.
To get this, right, you will need to make playlists. Then you remember how 20 years ago Dave Chappelle, with an assist from John Mayer, reminded us everyone can dance, if you just play something they like!
The smartphone has probably been great for team chemistry. Recall, around 2000, two teammates with different cultural codings could feud for weeks “over the music played in the (insert term) clubhouse.”7 That one little riff ruined lives, cost sports moguls small fortunes, and as long as we centre who was harmed, we can also laugh.
What is it about the Mets?
Mets are not made, they are born. Their métier is to win a straight-outta-Ted Lasso pennant once in a while. They had an MLB-high 44 come-from-behind wins. Presently, the confident righty-power-bat Mark Vientos is channeling all that. On Sunday, he became the first player under age 25 to have three extra-base hits in an NL playoff game, including two two-run home runs.
Flashback to 1999 and the pennant playoff the Mets lost in six games against Atlanta.
The New York tabs spent days pillorying Bobby Bonilla and Rickey Henderson for playing cards in the clubhouse area as the do-or-done game went into extra innings.8 It was actual heads-up team-mating by Bonilla. Henderson was irritated that he was taken out after 7½ innings in a ‘double switch’ substitution. Henderson knew he was no use to the Mets as a subbed-out player, and taking out the No. 1 run scorer in a ‘double switch’ — a strategy rendered obsolete by the DH — was dumb. Pull a hall of famer, even a 40-year-old, in order to put off the next time there would need to be a pinch-hitter for the pitcher.
So off they went to play cards, and it gave the media one of those stories playing on readers’ pre-notions about what pro athletes should do in a tense situation, especially if the athletes were Black or Latino.9
Anyway, Card-gate happened on Oct. 19, 1999. Mark Vientos was born in Norwalk, Conn., on Dec. 11, about eight weeks later. Proof he was born to be a Met.
What is it about the Phillies?
It is often said the Phillies play like a beer-league slo-pitch team — they hit for power, and give fielding a bit of an effort and promise to do better next time.
The explanation, possibly, is that Harper and four other regulars who are at least 30 first got exposed to MLB around 2004 or ’05. They might have wowed by ArenaBaseball. And they were too young or sheltered from the realpolitik of why U.S. Congressional hearings were held about the rate of home runs being rocked instead of, say, the flaws of the American strategy of going into Iraq.
(I know, no one wants the politics.)
They have cultivated their scruffiness. Will it get them the grand prize? Who knows?
Trader José Dark™ West Regional | Padres vs. Dodgers (tied 1-1)
Ballpark2Ballpark
It takes 3¾ hours to get from Dodger Stadium to the Padres’ park on Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner.
Real talk and hidden stakes!
Generalize the Dodgers as old-money Hollywood. The Padres are one of the first teams that cut free of the middleman, the dying regional sports networks,10 and moved all the local broadcasts in-house. It’s created some bookkeeping gymnastics. Forbes recently said five of the 30 teams operated at a loss, ‘led’ by San Diego, since suddenly a media company could not pay them.11
At the top, that imposes a bit of urgency to play ‘desperate hockey.’ The Dodgers will always be flush forever.
What is it about the Padres?
All of the above. By San Diego standards, this is their golden era. Since the unpause of baseball during COVID-19, they have played .537 baseball (while in a division where the Dodgers win at a .647 clip) and been in the playoffs thrice. The loss of local TV cash did not force a fire sale of billboard stars, such as Machado, Fernando Tatis Jr., or Xander Bogaerts.
They have been winning habitually down the stretch.
What is it about the Dodgers?
It is the Year of Shohei Ohtani, full stop. The fact that injuries to pitchers held the Dodgers under 100 wins, and that should highlight that while sometime a situation requires someone to be The Man, there are no one-man teams.
Ohtani’s unprecedented combo of 54 home runs and 59 stolen bases is Uncanny Valley. He homered in his first playoff at-bat, of course.
Getting ripped off by his interpreter sucked, but only cranks think it reflects badly on him. Ohtani is at one with his new whip, made just for him. He drives a custom Dodger Blue Ohtanilorean factory prototype that runs like a dream, like its driver. Illustrations bought in the Bruce McCall estate sale inspired it. One wonders if the Dodgers picked up ex-Jay Cavan Biggio this summer solely so he could park it and wax it daily, but one time he spilled some boba on the soft bamboo interior, and was DFA’d again.
Picture Ohtani, his spouse Mamiko Tanaka, with Decoy standing up on the armrest, in the Southern California of imagination. Their Ohtanilorean burns an experimental biofuel made from consommé. Try to calculate how many the people-hours and migraines chemists logged while they figured out how to keep the parsley out of the carburetor.
They probably had a prototype for the Canadian market in a slightly different shade of bright blue, too.
Conclusion (finally).
This was about writing one’s way out of not being so precious that the playoff system that is so random. Relax, have fun with it. Look for the themes, write about what you see, and feel happy for whatever fanbase sees their team win the grand prize.
To sum up, e
The Mets, Diamondbacks, and Atlanta Changeyournames all had 89-73 records. The White Sox beat Atlanta twice. On April 2, with a game-time temp of about 6.66 C in Chicago, pitcher Garrett Crochet led the winning effort in a 3-2 victory. The third game was postponed. So Chicago has cold springs?
On June 15, the Chisox gave Erich Fedde season-most run support in a road win against the Diamondbacks. Now here is where it gets weird.
During this ’24 season, Chris Sale won the traditional pitching Triple Crown after five seasons in the pandemic-affected baseball wilderness. The lefty whittled a 2.38 earned-run average, tallied 225 strikeouts, and was an 18-win earner.
It’s a free buffet if you want more modern metrics to replace pitcher wins. Sale led MLB in fewest home runs allowed per innings pitched. He also led the NL in the ERA-companion stats of ERA+ (how much better he improved compared to a generic pitcher), FIP (fielding-independent pitching, derived from walk, home run and strikeout rates).
Of course, to many, the first thing that comes up with Sale is when he was with the White Sox in 2016. He was “suspended for five games … after reportedly sabotaging the White Sox’s collared, navy shirts on a day of high temperatures and high humidity so they could not be worn by anyone.”
From the remove of eight years, it could read as a bit of climate rebellion. Seriously. At the time, he drew mock praise for a “masterful nonapology” in The Ringer. There was no mention of the climate crisis. However, Sale is a Floridian, and he grew up around the football culture and two-a-days in the “big bad” of 40C humidity. He might have seen news items in Chicago about people dying from heat-related illnesses. Of course, since he is a SP1, he converts that into “unorthodox and uncomfortable,” and baseball media take it to be self-centred. Perhaps he was a Wrong Guy To Make A Point, but still.
Of course, he gets traded to the Red Sox, gets to enjoy ocean breezes, earns a World Series ring in 2018. The following five years are a bit of a snipe hunt for his health, but 20 starts in 2023 are proof-of-concept that he has a second act. Atlanta signs him.
The jersey story might helped the lede-seeking aseball writer who writes, in a spring training optimism article in March 2024, “that tomahawk across his chest sure looks snug.”
Of course, the Atlanta team’s casual anti-Indigenous racism is just accepted. The commissioner thinks he made a point moving the 2021 all-star game and just giving it to them in ’25.
Anyway, that third win. June 27, one-off makeup game between an NL East powerhouse and the AL Central cellar trolls. Sale on the bump vs. Bullpen Day for the worst modern-era team. Sale leaves a slider where Luis Robert can serve it up for a home run. Sale throws 11 strikeouts across seven innings, but is debited with the L in a 1-0 White Sox win.
How can you not be romantic about baseball, eh?
Either way, in a season where Atlanta loses league-MVP leadoff batter
José Ramírez, Baseball-Reference.com.
George Selkirk, Baseball-Reference.com.
Tim Kurkjian, “ ‘Oh my God, how can we do this?’: An oral history of the 1994 MLB strike,” ESPN.com, Aug. 12, 2019. Note what Felipe Alou, manager of the 1994 Expos, said about the president of the team, Claude Brochu.
Jay Bell, Baseball-Reference.com. Bell was a 5.4 WAR player in 1997.
Associated Press, “Players Have Feuded Over Clubhouse Tunes,” May 19, 2000.
Zach Brazilier, “Bobby Bonilla: Controversial card game was Rickey Henderson’s fault,” New York Post, May 4, 2017.
But players leave the dugout all the time. Part of the lore of the 1986 Mets and the Bill Buckner game was that Keith Hernandez, after being retired to start the 10th inning, went directly to the manager’s office, got a beer and watched it on TV. Kevin Mitchell, who got one of the hits and scored the tying run, was also going commando since he had been on the phone booking plane tickets and did not have time to fully re-dress.
Alden Gonzalez, “What you need to know about MLB taking over Padres TV,” ESPN.com, May 31, 2023.
Forbes, March 28, 2024.