The Blue Jays are the Best Fourth-Place Team Ever; Win or Lose, Chaotic Good is still Undefeated
Let's get out in front of the Takes-Industrial Complex in case the Toronto Blue Jays are the odd team out and avoid ruminating over COVID-19 and MLB roadblocks. Oh, and where the hell was I?
The Toronto Blue Jays’ season, whatever awaits them Sunday, possibly Monday, and possibly Tuesday, is one for a book and a Jon Bois video.
There has never been a three-way tie for playoff spots in the history of baseball, the oldest of North America’s big four leagues. There could be a four-way tie between the Blue Jays, Evil Empire A, Evil Empire B and the Seattle Mariners for the two wild card spots.
Up to you, of course, with how to frame this season if the Jays end up playing my old sportsball position, left out. Please hold space for the notion that, as a franchise minted in the late 1970s, the Blue Jays are a Xennial franchise. That means they are here, as Bono said, to eff up the mainstream. They have MLB, assuming Rod Manfred has bodily fluids, sweating out the possibility that it will not have a Boston Red Sox-New York Yankees showdown that gets almost as big of a TV rating as an NFL prime-time contest featuring the Houston Texans.
Being the Best Fourth-Place Team Ever won’t be on a banner. It is a very quirky baseball-y thing that a Seamhead relishes. A chaotic outcome to crylaugh over.
Since Twitter makes every day feels like 100 years, it feels like the focus on the wild-card race has greyed out the memory of the race the Blue Jays had to run due to the pandemic.
Toronto played the equivalent of a full season as a travel team, like the Ruppert Mundys in Phillip Roth’s satirical The Great American Novel. Or like the ‘Greys’ in some flybynight indie league that funds a road team since it has an odd number of ownership groups and WHY DOESN’T THE CFL DO THIS TO FINALLY GET TO 10 TEAMS?
The reg season is 162 games. From 24 July 2020 through 29 July, the Blue Jays played 161 consecutive games outside of Toronto. Their record was 83-78. A team with that exact record once won the World Series — of course it was the St. Louis Cardinals — and an 82-79 team once fell one victory shy of taking the whole megillah.
Whatever might come, this season has been a banger. Let us face it, we are better off to root for the outcome that produces the most chaos and the strangest outliers to shield against the sports-industrial complex’s absurdities.
And this is it. The Blue Jays, with everything they were up against, could end up with the best run differential by a non-playoff team in the wild card era (est. 1994). And that’s after playing as a ‘travel team’ for four months. If they miss the playoffs, that is not failure. It seems more like, to channel Dan Jenkins, being a Dogged Victim of Inexorable Fate.
Major League Baseball, by the end of play on either Sunday, Monday or Tuesday, will have started and finished 111 league seasons of 162 games in duration. How many had four teams in one cluster — a 10-team league in the early expansion era, or a division since 1969 — record at least 90 wins?
Four. Four-for-111.
The 2021 AL East is the first wild-card era division where four teams earned at least 90 wins.
The other three outcomes all seemed influenced by a recent expansion that created new teams that were ripe for curb-stomping.
A brief synopsis of other Best Fourth-Place Teams Ever candidates
Pittsburgh Pirates, 1962 National League (93-68)
The great Roberto Clemente and crew ran fourth, 7½ games behind the Mays-led Giants. Pittsburgh had a three-week tailspin just after the all-star break where they dropped 11½ games in the standings.
This was the first year of expansion in the NL, with the Mets famously setting a record with 120 defeats. The other expansion team, Houston, played .400 ball. But the Chicago Cubs were pretty much an expansion-quality outfit that took the ‘L’ 103 times and did not even have a full-time manager.
San Francisco Giants, 1964 NL (90-72)
Content warning: this section involves the St. Louis Cardinals having a stroke of good fortune that reminds you life is just one long series of disappointments till you just wish Flanders was dead.
San Fran had six future hall of fame players. Three in their ‘everyday eight’ first-choice lineup with Mays, Orlando Cepeda and Willie McCovey, plus Duke Snider kicking around as a 37-year-old bench bat. Their two most-used pitchers, Juan Marichal and Gaylord Perry, would also earn a plaque in Cooperstown.
Did they have some Jesus-big run differential? Not exactly; the Giants were just in the meaty part of the curve, in a 10-team league that was legitimately seven deep. Per Baseball-Reference, seven teams graded out between 0.2 and 0.5 in Simple Ranking System (SRS). Their run differential was plus-69.
Nice… but over 100 runs fewer than the differential of these Blue Jays, albeit it a league with some true NFT (Not Effing Trying) teams. And San Francisco were not in the pennant hunt. They lost five games in the standings in August and ran out of road to recover.
Nineteen sixty-four, of course, was the year of the Pholdin’ Phils. Philadelphia hit the 150-game checkpoint with a 6½-game gap over the field. They lost 10 games in a row to open the door to the Cardinals capturing the flag in Game 162, and Frank Reynolds is probably still trying to figure out who pooped in the bed.
Snappy answer, without looking anything up: everybody on the Phillies except Dick Allen, whom Philly fans. media and team management soon ran out of town for an SWB (Slugging While Black).
Snappy answer, after looking some stuff up: everybody on the Phillies except Dick Allen, whom Philly fans. media and team management soon ran out of town for Slugging While Black.
Allen on-based .442 and slugged .634 during the Great Phold.
Baltimore Orioles, 1978 AL East (90-71): Like the NL of a decade and a half earlier, the AL’s competitive balance was skewed due to to juggling twin expansion babies and a problem child franchise like so many juggling balls… three, to be exact.
The Orioles only finished in the black in run differential thanks to going 11-0 against the Oakland A’s and beating them by an average of more than 3 runs per game. They had a minus-10 RD against the rest of the AL.
The next season, they were in the World Series, allowing manager Earl Weaver to complete his true legacy. Just not in one shot.
The Blue Jays, at least to a certain way of thinking, have made their point. A thousand words later, I think that is the point.
Effin’ Xennials, always taking forever to get to the point to explain how they are not always wantin’ more.
Ja, please forgive my unexplained several months’ absence.
Long story short, I obtained gainful employment late in the spring. I hired on with the InSauga.com news site, as one of their staff writers. It has been very fulfilling thus far and a lot of fun; this has taken up a lot of the energy slotted for ‘typing for rent and food and occasionally to get an endorphin high we have the happy accident of a well-turned phrase.’
The work is remote, and I am the 5 p.m.-12 midnight news writer every weeknight. (So long, any social life that COVID-19, mood disorders and a generally bad attitude did not kill, BUT PAYCHEQUES. Eh, Pierre Poilievre?)
I will stuff my thoughts about the state of Canadian media in a sack. Being a word-worker has its aggravations, but is the only thing that I do half-well.
Jonathon Jackson on Twitter: "I survived a quarter-century in #cdnmedia, but it's an industry that only masochists should get into these days. If any of my kids ever expressed an interest in writing and #journalism, I would push them toward PR/communications with all the subtlety of a bulldozer." / Twitter
Whatever this ill-defined and ill-starred endeavour might be, it is going to continue. To the end of practising my writing chops and trying to make a semiserious point in the guise of a joke that perhaps only you and I will get. If this newsletter ever comments directly on a sportsball game I just watched, then that will mean I am doing it wrongly.
There are some ideas for regular features, and a massive culmination of a rainy-day baseball-nerd project that I swear I almost have finished.
There might some Happy Endings fanfic. And 1990s Simpsons references. So many effing Simpsons references.
That is more than enough for today. Please stay safe, and be kind.