Up and Åtta | MLB playoffs, sentimental hygiene, and it may be the Padres' time

Two games deep into the 'regional' finals of the MLB playoffs, it is clear which team rates your support, based on tragical histories, and Bob Costas's selective memory.

In response to: all four MLB regional finals being level at 1-1; the Mets just went up 2-1 on the Phillies. You might call ’em the best-of-five Division Series round, but this is more fun. Click the headline to read it all!

If you have ever tried to create a Dollarama sports psychology course, Manny Machado pulling the Padres in close on Oct. 6 reads very clearly. It is the point where getting the W was not enough. It was time to kick some Dodger Blue arse.

In playoff baseball, it can all go to pieces tomorrow. It is a nomentum sport, where the starting pitcher and the depth of the bullpen are major hinges. However, the way the Padres wrested home-field advantage strongly suggested their series is flippin’ personal. This stage of den åttakantig malström could play out madly. But, if one must choose their fighter, then let’s do so. Start by writing out all the possible World Series matchups, working up from the matchups with the smallest TV markets (* these franchises have met previously).¹

1. Guardians-Padres

2. Royals-Padres

3. Guardians-Phillies

4. Royals-Phillies*

5. Guardians-Dodgers*

6. Mets-Guardians

7. Royals-Dodgers

8. Tigers-Padres*

9. Royals-Mets*

10. Tigers-Phillies

11. Padres-Yankees*

12. Tigers-Dodgers

13. Tigers-Mets

14. Yankees-Phillies*

15. Yankees-Dodgers*

16. Mets-Yankees*

A first-time matchup is always preferable. In the trade, this is known as anti-Costas coating. It also means the presenting networks and national reporters have to come up with some new angles instead of running over the same old ground from 1978, 1984 or 2009. Do they ever realize that has no sway with younger audiences, if there is no attempt to explain the people under those baseball hats?

Anyway, a key point today is there is nothing wrong with bandwagon jumping. It is the playoffs. It is fun to feel invested, and if you live by the Prison Johnny principle, you can just walk away in 30 seconds.

Warren Zevon (1947-2003) even had a term for it, I think… his song “Sentimental Hygiene” is about the innate good of just cheering for something without thinking about it too much. That might be needed very soon.

Everybody’s at war these days
Let’s have a mini-surrender
I need some
Sentimental hygiene

Everybody's had to hurt about it
No one wants to go without it
It's so hard to find it
Sentimental hygiene

With no further ado — a Game 3 is already underway, the bandwagons for the octet of October baseball teams.

---

i. Padres (vs. Dodgers)

Easy reasons to root for the Padres: brown-and-gold uniforms, San Diego is a great place to visit, nice ballpark, and a central group who might be greater than the sum of their parts.

They have been a fun watch for about five seasons. Unofficially, seven players — Machado, Fernando Tatis Jr., middle-infield mates Jake Cronenworth and Xander Bogaerts, leadoff batter Luis Arráez, and rightie SPs Dylan Cease and Yu Darvish — have posted a 4.8 WAR season or better. They all did it prior to this season, with other teams, in other positions. A 93-win team where no one had a career year is scary.

You can imagine them squeezing it all into rage-ball to unleash. Athletes now do pay attention to how the Level 4 stuff in the C-suites often mean games are 75 to 80 percent decided before the players take the field. The outside elements are there for the Padres to play the diamond version of Desperate Hockey.

Ballplayers are not oblivious, even if they might struggle to articulate it, to the economics. Last season, recall, the Padres, in 2023, became the first MLB team that had to DIY their local telecasts after their regional sports network tapped-out. The payroll went down, but top baseball ops exec A.J. Preller managed to avoid having a 1990s-vintage fire sale.

Wait, there is more.

The Padres are also the one constant flagship team in a city where sportsball offerings have come and gone. A World Series win would be such a cool outcome after what Dean Spanos, chairman of the NFL’s Chargers, did to the city’s football fans.

It usually takes a unique group to bring a major pro franchise its first title. The right combo of skills, want-to, emotional intelligence to know what it means to the fanbase, and the singular j’en ai marre to push through.

That is French for I’m fed up, and it felt palpable coming through the screens on Sunday. Again, though, this is nomentum sport.

t-ii. Phillies (down 2-1 vs. Mets)

Phillies on-field leader Bryce Harper, through injuries and COVID-19 pauses, is on a Hall of Fame career track. He will need a World Series ring and 500 career home runs. That way, the AI that is slated to start replacing Hall of Fame voters in 2039 will know to pick his career résumé.

His brashness leaves some old heads cold. Harper is refreshingly honest, at least relative to the norm, and doubtlessly with some influence from agent Scott Boras. Take how Harper and infield right-side mate Bryson Stott, two Las Vegas natives, reacted when Athletics principal partner John Fisher got the rubber stamp to move from chill Oaktown to Sin City.²

Normal athlete-speak would be, yeah, that’s great for them. Both Harper and Stott said, with a little more polish, no, this is soooooo dumb. If Vegas is going to get a major-league ballclub, let it come through expansion.

And, of course, Bryce Harper has been couched up to be this direct.

That 2009 S.I. cover.

The 16½-year-old Harper and his agent Scott Boras called their shot, with co-conspiratorship from Tom Verducci, in a June 2009 cover story for Sports Illustrated.³ The article is entitled, “Baseball’s LeBron,” which in-universe is a callback to when SI put LeBron James on the cover more than a year before his intake into the NBA.

Harper’s exploits do the talking. The article opens with semi-verified accounts of Harper’s high school coaches pacing off one of his 500-foot-plus home runs. That is a windup to Verducci pointing out that the travel-ball (post-) industrial complex is nurturing a ballplayer who sees no need for hierarchy, where codes are set according to Service Time, enter eyeroll emoji.

The article stands as a broadside against a sport that, per the writer, fetishizes being “a discipline that does not easily engender prodigies.”⁴ Verducci includes two near-identical quotes from LeBryce Harper: “Be in the Hall of Fame, definitely. Play in Yankee Stadium. Play in the pinstripes. Be considered the greatest baseball player who ever lived. I can't wait.”⁵

To some, that is cockiness. For anyone assigned Robertson Davies novels in high school, Harper appears as a self-actualized athlete.

The noun order matters too. Putting “Yankee Stadium” ahead of “pinstripes” is a bit of a Quiet Con. At any time, ¼ to ⅓ of MLB teams wear pinstripes! Many of them have fans who resent the Yankees’ resources, hegemony, and facial hair ban.

That all tracks to the Phillies becoming this decade’s Bearded Infantry. They are a high-payroll team, but that is needed to win the World Series.

That cover article places you where North American mass-consumption sports culture was at the time. June 8, 2009, falls several months into The Big Short recession and before the 12 months of hype about LeBron James’ decision.

It tells MLB it is in for a rough ride in the sporty-cultural marketplace. Fandom is becoming more individualized and unmoored from a team. You are losing a generation of fans, and good athletes since you do not understand how to highlight the Next One. Scott Boras, and his co-conspirators, get that.

Even hockey reconciles itself to why Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin were in the commercials that promote the NHL instead of a 10-year veteran.

Surely not by accident, “Baseball’s LeBron’ was published on the eve of 6-month-old MLB Network — where Verducci was/is a contributor — live-telecasting the first round of the MLB Draft. An old acquaintance named Guy Souviens, an itinerant TV worker says the first year of a new media network is measured like the movements of a newborn.

Just getting the first round of the draft live on air from a TV studio in Secaucus, N.J., is baby steps.

It was part of Commissioner Bud Selig’s longer-term strategy that all digital revenues would be split equally. Selig lost the battle in the Labour War of ’94, but by the millennium there was a way to balance vast local revenue disparities between the Yankees and Red Sox and the less profitable teams.

Of course, for a sports draft to be good TV, it must seem interactive. There must be a build-up, a chance for fans to express their wants for their teams and favorite players.

The NFL was first to it, seizing on the edge that almost all of its rookie class have played on television. It is also rich for schadenfreude, in the form of the Draft Day Slide meme. The meme hit its peak about, oh, four years before MLB even got its draft televised on its house network.

Aaron Rodgers, forever in the green room.

The NFL, and NBA, figured out the draft is promotion for their self-contained sports universes. Baseball sees it mostly as a way to control salaries from moment of intake.

By the early ’00s, seamheads have the term “over slot.” It was rhyming code for eff-you Scott, as in Boras.

In practice, it meant an organization would exceed the MLB-recommended pay guidelines to sign a prospect? Or would they bend to Bud Selig Bean-Counting Baseball Ops and draft someone signable?

So, the ’09 draft was in a studio in New Jersey, and Mike Trout is invited as the draft-eligible Jersey boy. This is Seligian counter-programming to a drafting bias toward college players and born-to-affluence, majority-white players from warm-weather environments with longer amateur and college baseball seasons.

Trout has blossomed playing high school ball two hours away from the studio.⁶ It makes sense to invite him. He is too promising a player for someone not to go over the eff-you Scott red line.

Selig was a pretty good commissioner. His Wikipedia page has ‘bio markers’ that show where he got his will to win.⁷ His self-actualization comes from being nurtured by parents who had to git before it was too late. He never attempts to play the image scrimmage. Some of his legacy projects are rooted in a very admirable, business-liberal, Jewish toughness.⁸ If his antecedents had ended up in Montréal instead of the American midwest, then he’s a Mordecai Richler character.⁹

Getting a high school prospect from a snow-and-raw-weather state means a lot to Selig. Throughout his time, he takes his cuts to address inequities in opportunity. Under Selig, an award for the best offensive player was created in honour of Henry Aaron, who led Milwaukee’s OG National League team to pennants when Selig was in his early 20s.¹⁰ From the start, all digital revenue from BAM¹¹ is shared equally.

The one problem with the televised first round is, due to “over slot” problem, Mike Trout, a modern Mickey Mantle, will be passed on by many teams.

Perhaps that reads as an attempt by the commish to shame some teams. Having Trout reeled in by the Angels at No. 25 overall amounts to collecting evidence. It calls out front offices who, even prior to the publication of Moneyball, played it safe by drafting only college pitchers and middle infielders. Selig was a history major, and he knows what to do with skimmers.

So, while Boras, Harper, and possibly an influential sportswriter were doing a work, Selig might have been doing one too. If you find coverage online of the ’09 draft, one will notice Selig uses the Spanish pronunciation of “Los Angeles” when he announces the Trout choice. That seems like he is paying respect on the Angels principal partner, Arte Moreno, the first Mexican-American to have a controlling interest in a Big-4 sports franchise.

Sure, it hasn’t worked out for Trout. Or Harper, just yet. But it all comes back around.

t-ii. Mets (up 2-1 vs. Phillies)

In the vibeconomy, the Mets rate high. They have played .625 ball since the start of September. At this stage, it is about having a legit star such as shortstop Francisco Lindor in the ‘2468 Kite.’¹² And a slugger such Pete Alonso, plus a young power bat in Mark Vientos who is getting off by playing out of his mind.

The Phillies have the Bryce Harper Ring argument. It exists for Lindor too. The Mets also need a fresh World Series title since the tales of the 1986 team are getting stale. They have gone 35 or 36 seasons without adding that third BOAT.

Also, if they win it all, former Blue Jays manager John Gibbons will have a World Series ring as a bench coach. There is a potential symmetry if he gets with a team who relies on 22-year-old catcher Francisco Alvarez. Gibbons’ first act in MLB as a catcher was marked and marred by being rushed to the majors at a too-early age. And Gibbons has been on SportsLit.

iv. Tigers (vs. Guardians)

A Carpenter used his lumber to Kerry the Tigers home with the hammer — Vic Rauter, possibly.

Initially, the plan was to put the Tigers a little lower. Any run the run-scoring-challenged Tigers have is to build energy for the dare-not-say-it with their next-door neighbor NFL team. That is the hole that needs filling.

Also, someone has to sourpuss it up by pointing out that the two wild card teams from the AL Central were a combined 24-2 against the White Sox. The French judges are insistent on a half-point deduction. However, the Tigers are showing heart.

v. Royals (vs. Yankees)

It is not the Royals; it is their region’s NFL counterpart, the neighboreenos who are riding a little too high on their own supply, which is also laced with casual racism.

There is no taking that NFL team name and that chant out of the equation with the Royals.¹³ The ball team is in a good spot, since No. 1 starter Seth Lugo is pitching the pretty-important Game 3 on Oct. 9, and the other three starters who twirled 160 or more innings all had ERAs of 3.75 or lower.

However, since TV never lies, minutes after the Royals finished off the Game 2 win, the trained response was to flip to the Kansas City Mahomies wearing out a non-conference tomato can — the Saints with Derek Carr behind centre — on Monday Night Football. Commentators Joe Buck and Troy Aikman noted the Kansas City crowd had just got an energy shot from hearing the baseball score. Then, about 15 seconds later, the damn chant began.

There is no getting past that. It is a copy of a copy ripped from college football’s Florida State Seminoles. A good TIL is that how Florida State even picked that name might have involved some ballot-box saboteuring.¹⁴ Cheating to win a vote in Florida? Yeah, shocking.

The reality is that “unique and collaborative friendship” bit of boilerplate, like a leaky defensive line, only holds up so long, since eventually an Indigenous nation will have new leadership, and they will ask if there are receipts.¹⁵ They might wonder why it took 49 years from the time Florida State adopted the nickname before an actual Seminole person graduated from the university.

There is a Ken Dryden-ism here: “The mainstream outlasts every decision maker.” Co-conspirators will also point out that it is just exhausting to “constantly have to make sure you’re not offending a population while carrying out traditions that really aren’t that authentic.”¹⁶

And, in a few seconds, names roll off the tongue like fall-off-the-bone brisket from one of KC’s famed restaurants. Since Chiefs Kingdom is the hashtag, license the Kansas City Monarchs name. Or since coach Andy Reid is all about finding new ways to have world-class sprinters score touchdowns, they can be the Kansas City Swifties.

However, as far as the Royals go, they are a group to warm up too easily Bobby Witt Jr. looks the part of a lodestar, as noted, and you imagine the

vi. Yankees (at Royals)

These are exciting times at Judge-Soto Manor, but the old bro-mide of Octoberball is that balanced strength wins out in most series. Surely, a series where (Brockmire voice) Bob Costas is commentating would have played up a historical comparison to a Yankees season that Billy Crystal dramatized into a damn fine HBO movie.

That fount of knowledge, Bob Costas, has been in his glory trying to place Aaron Judge into some historical context. How-ev-er… late in the game on Oct. 7, he starting Bobbling about how Judge’s batting record ranks with the best ever by a centrefielder, and he cited the OPS+ stat, which tells you how much better (or worse) a player’s batting was than the league average.

Fair enough, Judge put up 223 OPS+ this season. That tops the career mosts of Mickey Mantle (221), Willie Mays (185) and Joe DiMaggio (185). It tops the single-season best of Trout (198).

Yet, there was quite a long-overdue to-do about recognizing the recovered statistics from major leagues before the racist line was broken. And Costas did not mention Oscar Charleston from back in the 1920s. The sample sizes are smaller, but Charleston put up OPS+ tallies of 210, 232, 250, and 251 in the ECL and NNL.¹⁷

C’mon, Costas.

Incidentally, around 2001, in his New Historical Baseball Abstract, Bill James had a take that the 1961 Yankees were not a great team. One of his bones of contention was that they were home run-dependent on Mantle and Roger Maris.

Whelp, for that legendary (to Billy Crystal) ’61 team, 50.42 percent of their runs were scored or batted in by Mantle and Maris.

This season, Judge and Soto accounted for 49.57 of the Yankees’ scoring. Length through the lineup, much?

vii. Dodgers (at Padres)

The arms are depleted, mid-order run-bringer-inner Freddie Freeman is playing hurt, and their manager Dave Roberts is whining. This is not a team that is going to steal their heart the way that Dave Roberts stole second base in Game 4 of the Red Sox-Yankees 2004 pennant playoff.

Beside, this might be a placeholder season for the Dodgers. Shohei Ohtani will be pitching next season. His next Challenge Accepted will be to get his World Series ring as a two-way player instead of as a designated hitter.

Until then, the Dodgers are whatever overwritten TV series draws raves. They might rally, but this is a team with a Sedins-era Vancouver Canucks energy. Skillful, star power, but never enough — youuuuuu can make the riot joke.

viii. Guardians (at Tigers)

1. A theory you can disregard: the Clevelands are more afraid of winning a World Series than they are of losing one, and that courses through the entire operation. Seven 90-win seasons in 11 tries, and only one season where won a playoff series. And we know who got the last good cry.
   

   

   This was my desktop photo for well into 2017.

2. Sure, you say, they were one play of winning a World Series title in 1997 and 2016. Look at the opposition. In ’97, they lost to the wild-card Marlins, who were a random collection of free agents who were dispersed to other teams almost immediately. It was a small crime that Tony Fernández, one of the most beloeved Blue Jays, had a fielding flub that kept the inning open for the Marlins.
   
   In 2016, well, up 3-1 against the Chicago Cubs.

3. Infielders José Ramírez and Andrés Giménez, Gold Glove outfielder Steven Kwan, and the closer Emmanuel Clase all move with charisma and élan. This good group of dudes just needs a classic DH-only type. Think Peak Pronk days of Travis Hafner.¹⁸ In the mid-aughts, he had three seasons in a row with 5.0 WAR or better. Over the last six years, the most-used DH for Cleveland have combined for 3.7 WAR.

4. Given that Jim Jordan and J.D. Vance rep Ohio in elected office, how ironic is it that the Cleveland manager’s name is pronounced vote? That was sent in from Jeri Manders, an old high school flame of Guy Souviens.

5. People put more thought into naming their fantasy teams than Cleveland did into the rename to Guardians in 2021. They were too lazy or uninspired to even change all the letters.
   
   It reads as deliberate. They only change part of the name, and keep the same colors, so the jerkasses can blend into the crowd. It was a wink and wedge in the door for the endlessly aggrieved who claim, “tHe oLd nAmE wAs fInE” crowd.
   
   By the way, do MLB teams know there are many great color combos that do not include navy, royal blue, red, or black?

6. Look at how each team’s NFL neighbour has handled QB1. Coming into the 2021 NFL cycle, the Detroit Lions knew it was time to let Matthew Stafford go. Many teams would have laid out for a season and ruined the confidence of a rookie. Instead, the Lions repurposed Jared Goff, and rebuilt their front lines on each side of the ball.
   
   The NFL Browns guaranteed US$230 million to quarterback Deshaun Watson, and it is going great.¹⁹

7. Cleveland having the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame is a huge projection. I have never been. The Tragically Hip played many gigs in the city.²⁰ Are they in the shrine to rock and/or roll? No! Neither is Warren Zevon, even though he was a rock lyricist’s rock lyricist.

8. Their Guardians’ attendance has not topped 2.1 million since 2008. Sure, Cleveland is the 33rd-largest MSA in the U.S., but that is a trend-line problem.

9. Fan theory time! This is a franchise that cannot even take a hint when a comedy sequel broadcasts it. Major League II (1994), directed by Cleveland superfan David S. Ward, was definitely a message to the Cleveland front office that they needed to change their ways for Albert Belle and Manny Ramirez, not the other way ’round.
   
   In MLII, there is the jokey subplot where Cerrano (Dennis Haysbert), the Afro-Cuban slugger, converts to Buddhism and goes soft. At no point does anyone in management engage with a mental skills coach to help Cerrano keep his inner peace and return to blasting home runs to outer space. He finally has to just revert to his old belief system — Voodoo — in the pivotal game.
   
   Belle’s SABR bio is full of instances where he received racist harassment or was taunted about alcohol use disorder, and no one did anything.²¹ He was just expected to suck it up. He was isolated and called “the Travis Bickle of leftfielders” in Sports Illustrated. Did anyone try to meet him halfway so it can be a win-win-win?
   
   When he left as a free agent before the ’97 season, it’s portrayed as “poor Cleveland,” as if the front office had no agency in keeping him from leaving. Belle moved within the division to the notoriously small-change White Sox. Then he ends up in Baltimore and unable to play after age 33. He should have had 575, or 600 home runs.
   
   Ramirez’ intake into pro ball came in 1991, so a comedy director who was really into one baseball team would have known about him by the time principal photography began. Of course, the Boston Red Sox rolled with “Manny gonna Manny,” and won two World Series with him.

That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind — especially to yourself.

Oct. 6-8, 2024
Storms Corners / Loyalist Twp., Ont. : on the ancestral lands of the Haudenosaunee, Michi Saagiig, and Omámíwinini Peoples.

1. Metropolitan Statistical Areas, Wikipedia.

2. Bob Nightengale, “Bryce Harper, Bryson Stott not excited about prospect of A's moving to Las Vegas,” USA Today, June 15, 2023.

3. Tom Verducci, “Baseball’s LeBron,” Sports Illustrated, June 8, 2009.

4. Verducci, Ibid.

5. Verducci, Ibid.

6. Always use Google Maps.

7. Selig’s Wiki notes his “interest in baseball came from his mother. An immigrant from Ukraine, Marie Selig attended college, a rare accomplishment for a woman in the early 20th century, and became a school teacher.” His “father, Ben Selig, had come to the United States from Romania with his family when he was four years old.” One need not have studied too much 20th-century European history to know why Jewish families had to pack up and leave.

8. Read Rich Cohen’s Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangsters (Goodreads).

9. Richler was 80 percent ironyist and 20 percent Montreal Expos fan.

10. 1957 Milwaukee NL team, Baseball-Reference.com.

11. MLB Advanced Media was created in 2001, right after the Yankees won their fourth World Series title in five seasons. While not correlated, they have won only once in the last 23 seasons.

12. Catcher (2), second base (4), shortstop (6), centrefield (8). The reliable glovework through the middle of the diamond.

13. Lawrence Brooks IV, “As Kansas City Chiefs head to the Super Bowl, their violent traditions alienate even some local fans,” NPR, Feb. 3, 2023.

14. Well, then: “The name was adopted in 1947 after a fan vote; reportedly the new college football team preferred it so much that they stuffed the ballot box in its favor.”

15. Straight from FSU.edu.

16. Roger Brown, “OPINION: The FSU War Chant and Tomahawk Chop are insulting - but not to some readers,” Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Sept. 29, 2021.

17. Oscar Charleston, Baseball-Reference.com.

18. Hayden Goethe, “SABR Bio Project: Travis Hafner,” SABR.org.

19. It’s not! D.J. Byrnes, “The Browns Got The Sex Pest They Deserved,” The Rooster, Sept. 8, 2024.

20. Jeff Niesel, “The Tragically Hip Delivers Mesmerizing Show at House of Blues,” Cleveland Scene, Jan. 17, 2015.

21. Tom Wancho, “SABR Bio Project: Albert Belle,” SABR.org.