Turning to the Final Stretch

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Mike Yastrzemski

Mike Yastrzemski took a page out of Grandpa’s book Sunday to help the Braves clinch the NL East title.

As mid-to-late September weekends go, this one just finished had a few highs and a few lows. It also had at least one unexpected jolt of an injury to a batter who wasn’t even at the plate at the time.

In His Face Dept.—Alex Bregman did nothing but stand in front of the on deck circle with Michael Busch at the plate for the Cubs against the Reds in the fourth inning Sunday. Then Busch hit a check-swing foul off Reds righthander Luis Mey. Bing! The ball shot back, then into and off Bregman’s face, the veteran third baseman covering the stricken side as he made for the clubhouse.

“He got hit in the left cheekbone essentially, under the eye,” said Cubs manager Craig Counsell after the Cubs finished their 9-1 win. “I don’t know anything more than that right now. He was bleeding from his nose a little. There’s some swelling. It’s a terrible, terrible accident. We hope he’s OK.”

Bregman managed an Instagram post indicating he thinks he’s going to be more OK than his manager might: “Thanks for all the messages yall. I’ll be back.”

The better news for the Cubs: Most Valuable Player Award candidate Pete Crow-Armstrong smashed his 45th home run of the season, a two-run shot in the fifth inning. Last week, PCA became the Cubs’s all-time single-season home run hitter from the left side, passing Hall of Famer Billy Williams.

On the Threshold Dept.—Bregman’s injury may have sobered the Cubs postgame, but the win cut their magic number for a postseason berth to one. They might have clinched if the Diamondbacks lost to the Yankees Sunday, but the Snakes upended the Aaron Judge-less-again Yankees, 8-4.

The big blow: Nolan Arenado’s fifth-inning grand slam, his third salami slice of the season, off Yankees reliever Brent Headrick.

The good news for the Diamondbacks: The game was their 47th come-from-behind win this season, the best in Show. The bad news: They trail the Phillies for the final National League wild card slot by four games and have six left to play.

The Yankees have a wild card berth clinched. But to win the American League East, they’d have to win the rest of the way to season’s end and get a little help from their friends. They’ll have a grand chance to win half the battle: they start a four-game set against the division-leading Rays in Yankee Stadium Tuesday.

Whether You’re a Brother or Whether You’re a Mother Dept.—Going 52-25 since they looked dead and buried in late June has the Red Sox with a clinched American League wild card slot . . . but they needed some help from the Braves, who spent the weekend sweeping the Astros and thus enabled the Olde Towne Team—who lost to the Rays 5-1 Sunday—to clinch.

They’ve been rolling to the Bee Gees’s classic “Stayin’ Alive” during their long self-resurrection. “I think that pretty much says it all,” said left fielder Roman Anthony after they secured their slot. “We pretty much stayed alive when nobody else thought we could. Now here we are.”

It made the Red Sox only the fourth team to reach a postseason since 1903 after being fourteen games under .500 or more. Encouraging further note: two of the three previous reached the World Series, with one (the 1914 Boston Braves) winning it.

Let us remember: In this century, the Red Sox have made it to four World Series . . . and won all four of them. That’s a very far cry from their 20th century legend of extraterrestrial, star-crossed loss.

Land of the Braves Dept.—The Braves didn’t just nudge the Red Sox into the postseason with their weekend sweep. After clinching a postseason berth at all Friday, they finished their weekend clinching their seventh National League East title in nine seasons with a 4-2 win over the Astros.

“This is what it’s all about,” said outfielder Mike Yastrzemski while the Braves popped and sprayed the champagne after Sunday’s game. “It’s so hard to win baseball games in general in the big leagues because everybody is so good. It’s obviously not the end goal, but these are the times that you need to celebrate because it’s hard to get here.”

The grandson of Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski helped make things easier on Sunday, when he took a page from Grandpa’s book and hit one into the right center field seats with two aboard during a four-run sixth. The Astros’s Jose Altuve and Yainer Díaz homered solo and it wasn’t enough.

Walt Weiss, former major league infielder who’s in his first season at the Braves’s helm, agreed with Yastrzemski: “I told these guys winning the division is really tough. I know it’s the first step, but it takes six months to do it. It takes everybody, and we used everybody. Virtually everyone that got an opportunity stepped up and helped us win games this year. Special group in that way. Very close group.”

Weiss summed the Braves up well. They entered the season boasting of their depth, and the long grind they needed to prove its worth paid off.

One Lat, One Ranger Dept.—The AL West-leading Rangers took a blow this weekend: righthander Cal Quantrill hit the fifteen-day injured list with a tight right lat, incurred Saturday after twelve pitches to four Blue Jays.

Sunday wasn’t much better for the Rangers, their record back at .500 even with a loss to the Jays in which starter Jacob deGrom pitched despite some “mild” groin tightness and came out in the fifth with the bases loaded and the Jays up 3-2.

With the 7-2 final win, the Jays join the Astros in the hunt for the third AL wild card, and both finished Sunday two and a half behind the White Sox for the berth. The White Sox helped their own cause by spanking the Tigers Sunday, 8-1.

Chicago Unbound Dept.—Come to think of it, the White Sox finished Sunday remaining a single game back of the AL Central-leading Guardians. Their rough September nudged them out of the division lead, but they could still take the division with a stronger finish than the Cleveland company.

And to think that, just two years ago, suggesting a future higher than the basement for the White Sox was something out of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale.

Immaculate intro

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Payton Tolle

You’d grin, too, if you were just one pitch away from a game-opening immaculate inning and feeling you were going to nail it right before throwing pitch nine.

Payton Tolle can do an awful lot more than hug opposing hitters up the baselines or send other reminders of legendary fun-haver Mark (The Bird) Fidrych. He can even pitch. Sometimes, he can even do things for his team that only a Hall of Famer could and did 24 years earlier.

Things such as the most immaculate intro since B.B. King’s crying guitar ushered “The Thrill is Gone” in.

The big, bearish lefthander chose Sunday afternoon in Fenway Park to stand and deliver. Against the top of the Royals’ order. Nine pitches. Three strikeouts. Two swinging strikes followed by a called strike on Nick Loftin. Three swinging strikes by Bobby Witt, Jr. One foul followed by two swinging strikes from Jac Caglianone.

Tolle didn’t get to hug Loftin, Witt, or Caglianone. He simply grinned after pitch number eight, then pumped his glove and his fist and went, “Whooaaaa!” after strike nine. Nobody complained. Especially not the Red Sox, since Tolle went from there to pitch five shutout innings scattering four hits. To the Red Sox, those are hugs that help mean successful pennant races.

But they don’t exactly mind their gregarious southpaw’s act, either. Neither do the opponents. So far.

The only previous immaculate inning to open a Red Sox start was Hall of Famer Pedro Martinez, who did it to fellow Hall of Famer Ichiro Suzuki (swinging strikeout) plus Mark McLemore (called strikeout) and Rubén Sierra (swinging strikeout) on 18 May 2002. The most recent immaculate Red Sox frame in any inning was Chris Sale to the Twins in the top of the third on 26 August 2021. The victims: Nick Gordon, Andrelton Simmons, and Rob Refsnyder, performing their own version of “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing.”

The Red Sox won both those games, Martinez’s 4-1 and Sale’s 12-2. Tolle went from those first five to a slightly troublesome sixth: leadoff single (Witt), hit batsman (Caglianone), first and second and nobody out. Then: fly out to right (Salvador Perez) and back-to-back swinging strikeouts (Michael Massey and Matthew Lugo).

Didn’t seem to faze him. I can do this kinda stuff to ’em all through the picture, he seemed to say as he hopped off the mound. The Royals could have stepped into the batter’s box with bazookas, not bats, and Tolle would have indulged the hearty laugh. Then, he’d stuff a few fastballs down the tubes. With a cutter and a sinker now and then to break up the monotony.

All that with only one run to work with from his mates. More specifically, from Caleb Durbin,  who hit the first pitch he saw from Royals starter Nick Cameron over the Green Monster’s left center field side. You’d think a team averaging 4.4 runs a game playing an American League Central basement resident with a tragic number of four entering play Sunday could hand their most colourful pitcher a little bit more room to maneuver.

Oops. With Tolle finished after six shutout innings, the Royals now had a shot at the Red Sox bullpen. They opened against Erik Miller in the seventh with back-to-back inning-opening walks, a fielder’s choice making for an out at third the Royals challenged to no avail, and then Carter Jensen pinch hitting for Lofton and singling the run home against Garrett Whitlock.

Whitlock kept the damage to a single run when he got pinch-hitting Vinnie Pasquantino to fly out to deep enough center field for the side. Then the Red Sox got a crack at Craig Kimbrel, the veteran reliever. He once toiled for the Red Sox. His career then and since has been too much akin to the arsonist putting his own fires out. That’s a too sad decline for a guy who was one of the best relievers in the business, once.

Kimbrel spent the earlier part of the year with the Mets, before they released him to be picked up by the Rays—who released him, in turn, to be picked up by the Royals. His Royals stint thus far has actually been the best of the season and respectable in the bargain: a 3.27 ERA and a 3.01 fielding-independent pitching rate. The bad news: He’s given up ten hits in eleven innings’ work as a Royal, his walks/hits per inning pitched (WHIP) rate is a skating-near-thin-ice 1.27, and he sports a 3.3 walks-per-nine rate.

Entering a tie game to start the seventh, Kimbrel induced a leadoff fly out (Trevor Story) but walked Durbin and Nick Sogard back-to-back. Royals manager Matt Quartraro took no further chances. He pulled Kimbrel post haste and went to Connor Thomas. Double oops.

Thomas got rid of Andruw Monasterio with a punchout but Roman Anthony cashed Kimbrel’s errant chip, singling Durbin home to break the one-all tie. Thomas slid out of further trouble with another called punchout. But in the bottom of the eighth, Story slashed a two-run single. The score held for a 4-1 Red Sox win.

Shame, though, that Aroldis Chapman had to work the top of the ninth as if he was a late-career Kimbrel disciple. Putting out a small fire he set himself: back-to-back walks to open, then striking out the side. If we can’t discard the save rule just yet, perhaps we can call “no save” when you’re starting the ninth cold but setting your own fire from which to save your team?

None of which was enough to erase the joy of Tolle’s game-opening feat. Just the latest ode to joy from a pitcher whose mother’s guidance and memory inspired him to inscribe her favourite phrase for him (You’re so pretty) on one finger of his glove. If this keeps up, the Red Sox theme might become the wearing of the grin.

This time, it’s for real

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Arte Moreno

Arte Moreno leaves a serious mess for new owner Stan Kroenke to clean up.

A headline in The Athletic called the depths to which the Angels have sunk in the past decade plus the result of their soon-to-be-former owner’s meddling, myopia, and penny-pinching. That’s almost like saying the depths to which the nation has been plunged are the result of its president’s egoism, narcissism, and avarice. Thank you, Captains Obvious.

Angel Stadium is a hope, skip, and catcher’s throw to second base from what’s been called (mostly by its founder and the company he bequeathed) the happiest place on earth. The ballpark itself, and the fan base that fills it almost in spite of itself, hadn’t been the happiest place on earth in a very long time, until this week past.

Arte Moreno first entertained selling the Angels in August 2022 . . . until he didn’t. It wasn’t nice to tease Angel fans suffocating over a team’s ineptitude built (or should we say unbuilt) by the very owner teasing the sale. Then came Wednesday of this week, when the news broke like New Year’s Eve fireworks that Moreno agreed to sell at last, to Stan Kroenke and his Kroenke Sports and Entertainment group.

Christmas in September! Our long national nightmare is on the threshold of over! Goodbye, Arte, goodbye Arte, goodbye Arte, we don’t hate to see you go! There may have been no way season-long “Sell the Team!”-chanting Angel fans could have out-celebrated that news. Not yet, anyway.

The early reviews and previews have had it that Kroenke likes to win, owns a few other sports franchise who like to win just as much, and isn’t what Moreno proved to be. Kroenke isn’t known to be fearful of reasonable investment in his teams and their facilities. The Angel news was barely a day old when speculation arose that he’s willing to build the Angels a brand-new ballpark. With his own money, even.

Moreno was major league baseball’s first Latino owner, and one with pockets almost as deep as the Damn Dodgers or the Empire Emeritus. But this big-market owner with big-market resources preferred to spend like a flea market owner in a one-horse town—where the horse was a hobby horse. Unless he could find what once animated a certain longtime Yankee owner: “name guys who put fannies in the seats.”

Whether they cohered into a solid baseball team was the question Moreno could always ask later.

Since the Angel sale was first announced, observers have tripped over themselves and each other trying to decide Moreno’s top five foul-ups, bleeps, and blunders. Only five? Here we go again:

* He ordered then-GM Tony Reagins to deal for Vernon Wells after he couldn’t convince future Hall of Famer Adrián Beltré to sign as a free agent. Ignorance wasn’t bliss: the Blue Jays probably popped champagne corks over the declining Wells becoming someone else’s headache.

* Seeking scapegoats instead of solutions, he purged international scouting director Clay Daniels and overall scouting chief Eddie Bane over bonus skimming by some Daniels subordinates and never really seemed to address the Angels’s scouting problems at their depth.

* He addressed the Angels’s chronic pitching issues with bargain reclamation projects instead of sound development and free agency pickings—then, he (and Angel fans) watched enough of those projects deflate in Anaheim but a) find revival elsewhere; or, b) leave the game as what-ifs.

* He refused to deal Shohei Ohtani approaching two trade deadlines for much-needed infusions of youth and minor-league replenisments, then watched him walk into free agency and the Dodgers’s arms and back-to-back World Series championships.

* He handled injury-addled Josh Hamilton’s drinking relapse more clumsily than Donald Trump handles international relations: Hamilton obeyed the protocols and told on himself at once, but his Angels boss of bosses ran him out of town on a rail into the arms of the Rangers who wouldn’t have to pay a thing to take him back.

* He refused steadily to entertain dealing Mike Trout for needed youth and farm infusions and wasted the prime of the single greatest position player the Angels have ever known, now in an injury-depleted decline phase in which he has occasional flashes of his former self.

* Instead of entertaining an Ohtani deal, he went all-in on a 2023 trade deadline acquisition haul, but then put five players including their two key deadline acquisition on the waiver wire when that illusory 11-3 July finish turned into an 8-19 August.

* He barely registered the Tyler Skaggs tragedy, the popular pitcher dying of a fetanyl overdose, an Angels employee providing the stuff to Skaggs (he may have become addicted after surgery before he became an Angel), and the team finally settling with the his widow and family.

* He scapegoated several managers after Mike Scioscia’s retirement, especially Joe Maddon, Scioscia’s longtime bench coach turned Cubs curse-busting World Series-winning manager, whose even hands couldn’t lift an Angels team riddled with pitching issues and injuries, none of which were Maddon’s fault.

There’s a reason I haven’t mentioned Hall of Famer-in-waiting Albert Pujols plus C.J. Wilson, Zack Cozart, and Anthony Rendon. Injuries aren’t Moreno’s doing. He didn’t ask for Pujols to incur numerous lower body issues before releasing him to finish his career a Dodger and then a prodigal Cardinal.

He didn’t ask for Wilson’s body to prompt his retirement after two Angel seasons, for Cozart’s labrum, shoulder, and neck to put paid to his career after he was dealt away, and for Rendon to have nothing but injuries to show for his big deal after a serviceable (abbreviated) 2020. For those, Moreno’s off the hook.

For everything else, Kroenke’s going to have his work cut out for him. He’s going to have to remake/remodel a team whose now-former owner’s biggest legacy is wasting the primes of Trout and Ohtani. No matter how much money he has, no matter how much winning his other sports franchises have delivered, when it comes to the Angels there’ve been oil spills that were easier to clean up.

A Giant disaster, and other dog days afternoons

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Oracle Park

Oracle Park’s Opening Night pagenatry turned to a 1-0 loss and a season-opening three-game losing streak . . . a giant harbinger of disaster to come for the Giants this season . . .

As the dog days of August go, this year’s dogs took their time to run, even if they weren’t always as brutal on the heat side. (At least, not in my neighbourhood.) On the other hand, when I sat down to write seven American League teams with losing records remained in the wild card picture and nobody in the AL West had a winning record. (The Astros opened Sunday at .500.)

Thus do we approach September’s advent. With the National League slightly more respectable than the AL, with a mere four teams holding losing records and lingering wild card hunt positions. But Sunday also began with the Giants one game away from joining the Rockies at being eliminated from the postseason mathematically.

The Giants didn’t even have to lift a finger for that elimination. They had the scheduling quirk of a Sunday off-day, resuming play against the Diamondbacks to end the month. All they needed was the Dodgers to beat the Tigers, and they could relax. Well. The Dodgers won, 6-1, taking two out of three from the Tigers beginning with former Tiger Tarik Skubal’s ten punchout masterwork to open the set.

How on earth did these Giants sink to Rockies-level calamity? You don’t even have to bring up the ups, downs, quirks, and jerks of Rafael Devers and company, though you might want to consider Matt Chapman and Willy Admaes on big deals but approaching the downturn if they haven’t hit it already.

Start with the starting rotation. Behind Logan Webb (who opened with a whisper before rounding back up) it has no pitcher with a strikeout-to-walk ratio over 2.5 except Webb, and only one pitcher not named Webb (Landon Roupp) has a fielding-independent pitching rate under 4.00

They’re hardly the least run-preventive pitching staff in the Show (the team FIP is a league-average 4.16) but between those non-Webb starters and a bullpen losing enough leads after six innings to be tried by jury for treason, the Giants aren’t exactly the group the other guys’ batters fear.

Not to mention that PBO Buster Posey—Hall of Famer in waiting as a retired catcher, too many growing pains running the organisational show—spent much of the year with a shallow farm and a lack of bench depth when the injury bug proved a bit of a swarm. His trade deadline activity brought back some value but that won’t be manifest for another year or so.

Not to mention further that, well, you could dress these Giants up but you couldn’t take them anywhere. Entering Sunday they were .338 on the road (23-45) compared to .478 (33-36) at home. Their traveling secretary must have had a few too many days prepared to beg, “Do I really have to?”

Now, their long National League nightmare of 2026 is all over but for the September string. They sat at 9-19 for August following Sunday’s day-off mercy killing, the worst month of a season in which they never got closer in any full month than a game below .500 (in July).

Meanwhile, around the bases, down the lines, and up from the dugouts . . .

MVPete Dept.—That three-homer Friday Pete Crow-Armstrong treated himself against the fading Reds catapulted him a little more ahead of the NL’s Most Valuable Player Award  pack. Entering Sunday’s play, moreover, PCA led the entire Show with 8.3 WAR on the season (almost two full ahead of Shohei Ohtani) and 296 total bases. He also entered the day leading the NL in slugging, OPS, and OPS+.

He’s no slouch in center field, being seven runs above the league average for total zone runs and fourteen above the league average for defensive runs saved. Did we mention that he also leads the NL in win probability added? With Ohtani a mere sixth and Sal Stewart, the league’s runs batted in leader entering Sunday’s play, nowhere to be found in the top ten.

You Know Us, Sal Dept.—Stewart’s league leadership in the team-dependent RBI department ([RBI’s] depend on managerial control, a hitter’s position in the batting order, park dimensions, and the success of his teammates in getting on base ahead of him.—Branch Rickey) has the old/mold school salivating on his MVP behalf.

WPA isn’t the only truly critical category where Stewart sits outside the league’s top ten. He’s also outside the top ten in WAR overall, offensive WAR, defensive WAR, OBP, slugging, OPS, OPS+, hits, extra base hits, and walks. He’s a good player who promises greatness. But he doesn’t belong in the MVP conversation yet.

Knee Trembling Dept.—The Yankees’s promising rookie shortstop, George Lombard, Jr., suffered a brief spell of defensive hiccups after an eye-opening beginning, and now he’s dodged a serious knee issue. He “tweaked” his knee swinging during a Saturday game against the Red Sox. It turned out to have no structural damage but inflammation that might yet land him on the injured list at this writing.

Wild Teoscar Dept.—Back to that 6-1 Dodger win Sunday. It might have been a mere 3-1 but for Teoscar Hernández on the loose after he was hit by a pitch with Mookie Betts on second, Freddie Freeman on first, and one out in the top of the eighth. Tigers reliever Tanner Rainey promptly wild pitched the Mookie Monster home. Max Muncy almost promptly singled Freeman home from there. Then Hernández scored on another Rainey wild pitch.

All that after Hernández busted a one-all tie against Tigers starter Framber Valdez in the top of the sixth, smashing a hanging changeup into the center field seats with Freeman aboard.

Framber Valdez, Teoscar Hernández

Hernández about to send that hanger out . . . (SNLA capture.)

Mercy, Mercy Mess Dept.—Dropping two of three to the Astros this weekend won’t slaughter the Mets’s otherwise fine August. (They were 14-12 after Sunday’s 6-3 loss.) But they were 11-6 as of 19 August. Then, they went 3-6 including Sunday. Still, watching their youth brigade continue to play without surrender has been fun, and they will finish August with their second winning month of the season.

But only their second, alas.

Realignment, and it’ll feel so good

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Do you really think they feed Christians to the lions here?

Having a look at the standings Monday morning should have been enlightening and enraging at once. Nine American League teams with losing records showed as still eligible in the postseason hunt, thanks to the execrable wild card structure. Likewise, one .500 National League team and two sub-.500 NL clubs showed still eligible.

That’s eleven out of thirty major league teams without winning records who can still call themselves contenders in this season’s pennant races. Four teams short of half. Do you really need me to tell you what’s drastically wrong with that picture? Do you really believe there’s nothing wrong with that picture?

Turn youself away from the continuing and (for some perverted contingencies) comforting howl of Damn Dodger bashing and ponder: With today’s wild card structure is it really any wonder there are a few too many teams who can think to themselves, and all but get away with it, that they bloody well don’t have to invest seriously in their major league product or their player development systems?

None dare call it by name. But teams not called the Mets don’t have to channel their inner 2011-2013 Astros and say it outright, either. You’d have to be sound asleep or somewhat naïve to believe tanking hasn’t receded or become extinct. They’re just not being as flagrant as those Astros happened to be about it. And, unlike those Astros, they’re not even pretending to promise great results down the proverbial road.

In 2022, Joe Sheehan wrote, “We should retire the term ‘tanking’ in baseball. It was an issue specific to the 2012-16 period when a bad [collective bargaining agreement] had too many incentives for losing. Now, teams not trying to win aren’t doing it for draft position, they’re doing it because it’s easy profit.” That’s not tanking? I have a DeSoto dealership to sell you cheap.

The owners now demand salary caps more than ever. (You’ve heard it before: stop us before we overspend/mis-spend/mal-spend again!) Practically everyone else outside Los Angeles thinks it’s all aimed at bringing the Damn Dodgers back into line, and they think that’s a bloody good thing. They think it’s nothing more than spending that keeps the Damn Dodgers ahead of the rest of the pack. They may also think Dodger Stadium is where they feed Christians to lions.

They pay little to no attention when Tarik Skubal—you remember him, the big enchilada of this past trade deadline, traded to the Dodgers for some prime enough prospects—came right out and said, “Every team could trade for me. Every team could make that acquisition.

And I don’t really sympathize with people that blame the Dodgers for anything they’ve done . . . They’ve developed a really good organization. They draft well, they acquire talent really well, they retain talent. It’s a winning organization. Now the complaints seem to be because they’ve won the last two World Series. I don’t think it was like that three years ago. So I don’t really sympathize with people that are complaining because the Dodgers do all the right things.

Boy, you can’t please anyone anymore, can you?

Once upon a time the wailing, gnashing, and crying was that we may never again see a repeat World Series champion. Oops. The Damn Dodgers just won back-to-back Series. The big rich guys also entered this season as the overwhelming favourites to pull off a three-peat unseen since the 1998-2000 Yankees.

Are you getting as tired as I am of pointing toward the Mets, who’ve actually out-spent the Dodgers this year, but who sat seventeen games out of first in the NL East Monday morning. (That’s thanks to their pre-August disasters. They’ve spent August going 12-8.) Assuming you read and paid attention to it in the first place, did you forget Ken Rosenthal’s assertion in The Athletic after the Skubal trade?

[H]ere’s something else the Dodgers exploit: the risk-averse nature of so many other clubs in today’s game . . . [T]he dirty little secret of a salary cap and floor system is that it would not guarantee small-market teams success. Many would need to develop more of a killer instinct, an instinct the Dodgers demonstrate time and again.

There’d be no guarantee of small-market team success in a twelve-team postseason picture with a shorter regular season, either. If there’s one thing the Lords of Baseball have proven time and again, it’s that they’ll find or create every loophole they can to continue demonstrating that, to them, the common good of baseball equals making money for themselves, if allowed.

The present postseason structure and season-long interleague play have already rendered the regular season something between a gag and a farce. (They’ve also left the All-Star Game an exercise in futility.) They’ve left genuine competitors to have to plow through those with no legitimate business in a championship round if we had a postseason that makes the regular season meaningful again.

We might have to begin the overhaul by overhauling the selection of baseball’s commissioner. The last commissioner who genuinely believed the good of the game was more and deeper than making money for it was putsched by the owner who squirmed, bumped, and muscled his way to the commissionership. The owner who hand-picked the current commissioner who has no vision for the game above and beyond the profits for his thirty employers.

Frankly, the commissioner should be elected by votes of two contingencies: the ownerships; and, the players through their team reps. The commissioner would be beholden not to one or the other faction but to both. (That’s kind of what Fay Vincent, flaws and all, hoped to accomplish before Coupmissioner Selig and company forced him to resign before they could execute him. How dare he.)

Now, about that realignment of both the leagues and the postseason picture. Simpler than you think. I’ve talked about it elsewhere. It’s worth discussing again.

Baseball is a franchise business. The company makes (or should make) certain rules for its franchisees, including the one that should have been heeded morally and ethically but just might need a legal boot in the backside to make stick: If you buy a ballclub and refuse to invest reasonably (and not just monetarily) in putting an honestly competitive product on the field, the company will force you to sell to an owner(ship) that will.

(You think I’m a madman with no regard for property rights? Ask what happens to the McDonalds or the Baskin-Robbins or the Jersey Mike’s franchiser who fails to build and perform reasonably.)

Having done that, we realign the leagues. Expand each by a single team each. Sixteen NL teams, sixteen AL teams, no more odd-numbered leagues. Then, we subdivide each league into conferences and divisions. An eastern and western conference in each league; an eastern and western division in each league of eight teams apiece.

Now comes the fun part: we dump the wild card system whole. Dead. Buried. Right next to regular-season interleague play, the gag whose shelf life expired before Pontiac did. (We also send Commissioner Milquetoast’s Manfred Man the way of the Checker Cab. I’m betting the Checker Cab would prove to be missed far more.)

In its place, we schedule each league with reasonable interconference play that does not equal or overwhelm intra-conference play. And the leagues don’t see each other except a) in the All-Star Game; and, b) in the World Series.

We also get to dump the postseason saturation we now endure. The current system means that, if each postseason series goes the complete distance, there’d be 53 postseason games. By the way, the Damn Dodgers bashers do know that last year’s Blue Jays got to within a hair’s breadth winning the World Series. Don’t they? (How dare that old fart Miguel Rojas spoil it with a top-of-the-ninth home run before throwing the lead Jays runner out in the bottom?)

With all the foregoing, yes, we can still have a 162-game regular season. (Earl Weaver, Hall of Fame manager: This ain’t football. We do this every day.) But now we have a League Championship Series, and while we’re at it we’ll return it to its original, pre-1985, best-of-five format. That restores the World Series to its proper position as baseball’s sole best-of-seven set.

The greatest sports show on earth. The one that stood skyscrapers above all the other sports who did their level best to make almost-everyone-gets-a-cookie postseasons legitimate championships.

And if you team doesn’t finish the regular season in the parking spot marked first place? Spring training’s only four months away. Time to get to remaking/remodeling work. 

Portions of this essay have been published previously.