Tag Archives: MLB postseason

The Bronx is burning. Again.

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Yankee Stadium

Nothing frustrated Yankee fans more than the pennant-winning Astros sweeping them out of the ALCS and celebrating in Yankee Stadium itself. Except maybe seventeen out of eighteen 21st century postseason push-outs and only one now fourteen-year-old World Series title.

Well. No wonder Yankee fans are somewhere between restless and roiled. Codify, a group whose specialty is “personalised game planning for greater pitching success” (their words, not mine), doesn’t restrict their observations to the mound alone. Two days ago, they noticed and shared something rather significant.

They noticed that, between 2010 and this year, the major league team that spends the most has gone to the World Series the least. That would be the team just flushed from the postseason by the ogres of the American League West in four straight American League Championship Series games.

Three out of six of, shall we say, the Show’s “thriftiest” teams (read: cheapest) have actually gone to the Series twice in that span. One was the team formerly known as the Indians, who fell to the Cubs (of all people) in seven in 2016. A second was the Rays, hosannaed perenially for the greatest ratio of competitiveness to roster payroll.

The third was the Royals, who went to the Series back to back and more or less had the second of them handed to them on a platter. (One more time: the Mets lost a 2015 Series that they could have won but for a defense that could have been tried by court martial for desertion.)

The Yankees, who spend almost habitually as though they’re the only baseball team authorised to operate their own mint presses, haven’t reached the World Series once in the same thirteen-year time frame. Only one other team within reach of their spending levels hasn’t, either, and that would be the fourth-highest spenders in Show over that span.

The Angels are a mess thanks to an owner who thought (erroneously) that baseball was marketing alone. (Said owner now plans to sell the team, which has Angel fans uncertain whether that’s a gift from the Elysian Fields gods or a reboot of My Mother, the Car in waiting.) The Yankees are a mess only in the terms by which their history and their fan base demands: if the Yankees aren’t in the Series, never mind winning it, the season is an abject failure and the Series is illegitimate.

Their 20th century success spoiled both the organisation and Yankee fans rotten. Their 21st century . . . well, you can’t really say a team that’s won ten AL East titles and gone to eighteen postseasons in 22 years is an abject failure. You can’t, I can’t, but Yankee fans can. And, do. Vociferously.

Across town, the Mets who haven’t enjoyed a quarter of the Yankees’ success have a fan base that gives cynicism a name rotten enough. The only thing needed to send too many Met fans into a spell of depression is a single bad inning in a game they might even win. In April.

They’re downright cheerful compared to the Yankee fan who thinks a single postseason game loss (never mind a postseason series loss) equals a mandate for summary executions. Preferably yesterday. (Remember: To err is human, to forgive is not necessarily Yankee fan’s policy.) Dodger fans are catching up to that rather rapidly.

Too many fan bases, what remains of them, would love to have those problems. Too many fan bases have been abused by tanking. Too many fan bases have been battered not by tanking but by brains gone to bed in the front offices of teams refusing to tank. A few make mythologies about of their teams’ signs of promise followed by surrealistic on-field calamties.

With or without blindfolding and spinning me, I could not find for you even one Yankee fan who would have believed, in his or her worst nightmares, that their historic rivals from New England would open a century with three more World Series rings than the Yankees have in the same century’s first 22 years.

That was then: The Red Sox opened the 20th century with four more Series rings than the Yankees in the century’s first 22 years, they now have their struggles and mishaps, but Red Sox Nation has graduated to a state of what you might call inverted bliss. They know the Red Sox will win again. They strain to avoid obnoxiousness when the Red Sox don’t.

This is now: 40 pennants, 27 World Series championships, and 58 postseason appearances can’t comfort the Yankee fan who believes to his or her soul that life was sweetness and light when it was only yesterday that the Yankees were never less than baseball’s practically annual masters of all they surveyed.

Yester-century’s Red Soxs fan believed extraterrestrial disaster was their birthright. This century’s Yankee fan believes postseason arrest is a miscarriage of justice—for which every other Yankee in uniform or in administration must pay with his life. The Yankees have had seventeen postseason arrests in eighteen tries since the turn of this century. There are teams who’d have loved to have half of eighteen tries over the entire 54-year history of divisional play.

A retired New Jersey school principal and blog editor of my acquaintance, who is also a Yankee fan of impeccable stubbornness, writes (in the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America’s Here’s the Pitch newsletter, to which I also have the honour of contributing) that Philadelphia’s man of the year (so far), Bryce Harper, is the one the Yankees let get away—having failed to even think of making him an offer when he hit the free agency market for what he swore would be the only time in his life.

You might think that a professional educator would know without being reminded that the one who got away gets away only if you bait the hook and cast it in the first place. In Harper’s first Philadelphia season the Yankees had an AL East winner that swept the Twins in the division series but fell in six ALCS games to (sound familiar?) the Astros.

Those Phillies had only begun to hit their reset button. They play for a fan base that’s inspired people to imagine a Philadelphia wedding ceremony concluding with the clergyman instructing the gathering, “You may now boo the bride.” Show me a New York wedding featuring a hapless bridegroom who misses when stomping the napkin-wrapped goblet for good fortune, and I’ll show you a Yankee fan among the gathering demanding an immediate marital annulment.

It wasn’t a lack of Harper that took the Yankees out, then or now; it was lack of figuring out how to figure out the Astros’ solid starting pitchers and redoubtable relief corps. A lack of Harper didn’t send the Yankees home in an ALCS sweep this time; an inability to compel the Astros changing their diet from near-constant breaking balls on which they couldn’t even feed intravenously to just enough fastballs on which to gorge, did.

Aside from which, the Yankees had a Harper of their own in-house already, then and now. This time, they broke Aaron Judge under the weight of compelling him to carry them in the second half, while he made history as they went from ruthless conquerors to skin-of-their-teeth division-title survivors.

They had little enough to pick it up when Judge was finally unable to carry that weight any longer. Now, they risk losing him to another team willing to break their bank to sign him as a free agent, after he bet the house, the yacht, and half of the Bronx on his future at the season’s opening tables and ended up throwing 62 passes for openers.

Not even the most unapologetic but objective Yankee hater wishes real ill to fall upon them. Without Goliaths, baseball’s Davids have no targets. (It’s difficult to conceive the Yankees as David. This ALCS was Goliath vs. Goliath. The Phillies will be the World Series’s Davids.) Baseball’s health depends upon its Davids making honest efforts to win, top down. But too many baseball Davids surrender before the season’s first shots are slung.

Enough are baseball’s Goliaths who meet their Davids deep and often enough in the postseason. Their fans become frustrated, understandably. Fan noise sometimes makes it difficult to determine which is worse. Is it teams that invest unapologetically only to come up too short, too often? Is it teams that could invest but elect premedidated failure, on behalf of building for futures that depend on wiser minds than their incumbents?

You get the latters’ fans more than you get the formers’. And among the formers’ fans, none seem half as disgusted as Yankee fans. Or—to fans of the Davids, whether those Davids become so honestly or by premeditated, decadent design—half as disgusting.

Two relief tales from . . .

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Two relief pitchers will miss postseason time thanks to circumstances unrelated to play on the field. One will miss the rest of his team’s postseason, however long it lasts, thanks to a self-inflicted injury. The other will miss his team’s postseason and say goodbye to that team. Neither man’s postseason had to end this way.

Astros reliever Phil Maton broke a bone in his right pinkie after his appearance in the team’s final regular season game. He’d surrendered two hits plus the only two runs the Phillies scored in that finale, and he was unamused, understandably. What wasn’t so understandable was Maton punching his locker in frustration.

Lockers aren’t any more forgiving that outfield walls or pitchers’ mounds when it comes to human flesh and bone piledriving into them. It doesn’t matter whether the flesh and bone combination is 20, 22, or 29 years old, the latter being Maton’s age. Those stiff, hard, stationary structures can do more damage to their attackers than Muhammad Ali did to his when answering a right cross.

Yankees reliever Aroldis Chapman had annoyed his team already with an injury from a tattoo he acquired, costing him almost a month’s worth of time over August and September, never mind that prudence and his team overseers probably couldn’t convince him to wait until winter vacation to think about another work of body art.

But Chapman’s decline this season prompted his replacement as the Yankees’ closer and, apparently, didn’t sit well with the howitzer, either. Thus did he fume about his demotion until Friday last, when the Yankees conducted a team workout preparing for the division series with what proved to be the Guardians. (Their first place finish rewarded the Yankees with a wild card series bye under the new, dubious postseason system.)

Chapman had told the team he’d be there. Until he wasn’t. To put things kindly, Yankee general manager Brian Cashman was far less amused than was Maton to have handed the Phillies a pair of hits and runs:

It was surprising at first, a little shocking, but after the shock wore off, when you add everything up, it’s not surprising. There’s some questions about whether he’s been in all-in or not for a little while. He’s maintained verbally that he’s in, but at times, actions don’t match those words.

Maton knew at once he’d been a damn fool. “It was a short-sighted move,” he told the press after that game, “and, ultimately, it was selfish. It’s one of those things that I hope doesn’t affect our team moving forward.”

He may be fortunate that the Astros have someone to step in. The Astros may be more fortunate. Bryan Abreu’s fielding-independent pitching rate for 2022 is 2.12, against Maton’s 4.33 FIP. It won’t parole Maton from the Dumbass Zone just because his absence may actually have done the Astros a small favour.

Cashman merely fined Chapman for his absence. He left the roster decision up to manager Aaron Boone. Boone wasted very little time in removing Chapman, despite the Yankee bullpen overall being in questionable enough shape as it was before it lost stretch-drive comer Scott Effross to forthcoming Tommy John surgery.

“I think he questioned whether or not he was going to be on the roster or not,” the manager told a reporter. “But he needed to be here . . . I think there’s a chance he absolutely could have been [on the roster]. We’re still actually getting ready to start those conversations now. He may have been. It’s a moot point now.”

The Yankees told Chapman—whose once-vaunted fastball still had the speed of light but wasn’t exactly invulnerable any longer, not with his 2022 marks of a 4.46 ERA and a 4.57 FIP—to go home to Florida for the division series.

That’s the official word. Unofficially, the word comes forth that, in effect, they’ve told him they’re not terribly inclined to think about bringing him back after he hits free agency this winter. Not with Clay Holmes having emerged as an All-Star reliever and the Yankees’ number one closing option.

It may be lucky for Maton that the Astros may not be injured (oops) by his absence as their postseason gets underway. (The AL West ogres, too, earned a round-one bye under the new system and will tangle with the pleasantly surprising Mariners in their division series.) They can absorb his D.Z. moment and hope he’s learned or re-learned something about self-control.

It’s anything but lucky for Chapman that the Yankees would have needed him to stay all in and step up as big as he could with most of the Yankee pen now in shambles. Holmes (shoulder strain) and Wandy Peralta (a back issues) are back for the division series, but Zack Britton (arm fatigue), Chad Green (Tommy John surgery), Michael King (elbow fracture), and Ron Marinaccio (shin injury) aren’t.

Chapman isn’t any D.Z. non-entity, of course. Not with his domestic violence history that caused enough people to question why the Yankees traded for him (from the Reds), traded him away (to the Cubs, for key contributor Gleyber Torres), then re-signed him in the first place, all within the same year.

When a howitzer that can fire 100+ mph shells gets a pass from domestic violence but finally runs around over an injury from an elective act and, then, shenks a team workout atop a questionable attitude as they prepare for a postseason, something seems badly imbalanced there. It might begin with a 34-year-old who still displays often enough the mind of a four-year-old.

The kids are alright, the postseason isn’t

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Steven Kwan

Steven Kwan’s grand salami slammed an exclamation point on the young Guardians’ AL Central division clinch last weekend. But the postseason to come has exposed, yet again, a flaw too many in baseball government’s current (lack of) thinking about the current (lack of) true pennant race and championship meaning . . .

Considering what most seemed to think going into this season, you could be forgiven if you thought the Guardians might dig deep enough into music history to declare their team song the Who’s rock and roll chestnut, “The Kids Are Alright.” They might also reach further for Nat King Cole crooning “They tried to tell us we’re too young . . . ”

They may keep trying to tell them, now that the young Guards are the American League Central champions. Maybe the division wasn’t exactly the strongest in the league. The Guards still had to prove that their actual foray into the past—going as old-school on the field and at the plate as they could get away with—would still work.

It may (underline that, ladies and gentlemen) be the only thing old school about the postseason to come.

Less than three decades ago baseball’s postseason was the nation’s most meaningful because it remained the most exclusive in professional team sports. Even with divisional play then, you finished your season with your cans parked in first place or you waited until next year. Well, let’s look at three decades ago precisely.

There were a mere four divisions. East and West, each league. Their champions were the Blue Jays, the Athletics, the Pirates, and the Braves. The Blue Jays and the Braves went to the World Series; the Braves, of course, got there on Sid Bream’s impossibly dead legged dash home. The Blue Jays won the Series in six; Pat Borders (1.250 OPS in all six games) was the Series MVP.

Come 1995, the World Series restored after its cancellation due to the owner-provoked players’ strike, baseball accepted three divisions and a wild card team in each league. This didn’t dilute the season’s competition so much as people feared, even if there was something disconcerting in watching a couple of teams fighting to the last breath to finish in second place.

That was also the year the classic Braves teams of 1991 through the mid-Aughts won their only World Series, against a club of the Guardians’ Indians ancestors. (Hall of Famer Tom Glavine through eight plus Mark Wohlers in the ninth shut the Indians out, 1-0.) Both the Braves and the Indians finished the season as division leaders. All remained reasonable.

Next month, baseball will see what the NFL, the NBA, and the NHL have known for a few decades—forty percent of its teams going to the postseason. This month, we’ve seen the result of the Manfred Administration’s propaganda that a more deeply expanded postseason entry field would surely guarantee more exciting pennant races.

It’s been exposed as a factual and shameless lie. A lie even more egregious than the lie that the pitch clock will shorten the times of games while the continuing proliferation of broadcast commercials between each half inning and during pitching changes actually does elongate them.

Deadspin‘s Sam Fels has observed just how much more “exciting” it’s been, if you define “exciting” as putting fannies in the seats. He couldn’t help noticing that, last week:

* The Phillies, hanging by a thread in the National League race, hosted the Jays, hanging in for a home-field wild card advantage. Citizens Bank Park holds 42,792 people. Both those Phillies-Jays games, postseason-critical games, barely drew half for each.

* The Milwaukee ballpark formerly known as Miller Field can hold 41,900, but held barely half when the wild card-contending Brewers hosted the National League East-leading Mets for three games. The Brewers drew slightly more than half the park’s capacity and still about a grand less than their 2022 average thus far.

“Those aren’t bad crowds,” Fels writes, “but at the end of September against a well-known and good team . . . wasn’t the point of all this that September attendances would be juiced?”

 . . . That doesn’t mean there aren’t teams drawing well. They’re the names you’d expect–the Dodgers, Yankees, Padres, Braves, Cardinals, Astros. And the overall economy has many factors that don’t Uleave a whole throng of people with the disposable income to attend a ton of games. Except, again, we were told that more teams vying for more playoff spots were supposed to punch through these kinds of factors. It’s what they’ve been telling us for nearly 30 years.

It may just be that fans actually recognize when the regular season is devalued, and the dangling carrot of just two or three wildcard games doesn’t really get the loins tingling. Or that teams that have playoff spots locked up for months can’t really generate excitement until those playoffs actually arrive, unless you’re the Dodgers. Playoff expansion was supposed to bring anticipation and excitement to places it doesn’t normally live. Look at the numbers and tell us.

I looked at the same numbers as Fels. Then I caught hold of the Mets hosting the Marlins in Citi Field Tuesday night, a game that’ll be remembered if at all for a) the Mets losing 6-4, to fall into a tie with the Braves atop the NL East; but, b) Marlins pitcher Richard Bleier  becoming the first pitcher since the birth of the American League to balk three times against . . . the same batter, enabling the Mets’ Jeff McNeil to score without stealing a base or a ball in play after he reached himself on an infield hit.

Citi Field can hold 41,922 in the seats. Tuesday’s game drew 69 percent of that. The game was meaningless (other than the spoiler role) to the eliminated Marlins but critical to the Mets, especially since the NL East is the only remaining division race yet to be resolved, and the formidable, defending World Series champion Braves refuse to go gently into that not-so-good gray night. (Hurricane Ian may have more than a little something to say about the two combatants’ coming weekend set in Atlanta.)

Mike Trout, Shohei Ohtani

Trout and Ohtani, plus the Yankees’ Aaron Judge, are almost all that’s left to root for thanks to baseball’s postseason race competition dilution.

All of that tells us playoff expansion does no favours to the game or its fans, but it does plenty of favours for that which is nearest and dearest to Commissioner Nero’s and his employers’ hearts. Well. They may remain the gang that believes the common good of the game equals making money for it, but they can’t (or won’t) answer what good 40-60 percent full houses do for those cherished coffers.

The expanded pelf for the playoffs goes to all teams regardless of whether they become postseason teams. “This only softens that lack of additional fans attending games that they’ve come to realize doesn’t really mean anything,” Fels writes. “MLB can shrug off the lack of heightened ratings or attendance with the bigger checks from TBS, FOX, and ESPN.”

Almost the only things left for which to root are Yankee outfielder Aaron Judge, Angels outfielder Mike Trout, and Angels unicorn (pitcher/designated hitter) Shohei Ohtani. Hall of Famer-in-waiting Albert Pujols reached his lifetime 700 home run milestone in his homecoming finale with the NL Central-champion Cardinals, but Judge, Trout, and Ohtani still have long distance achievements to achieve.

The Yankees are the official AL East champions, and on Wednesday Judge met Roger Maris at last as the AL’s single-season home run champion. Pressing perhaps understandably since he matched Babe Ruth’s 1927 output, Judge has eight games left to pass Maris. Few are willing to bet against him still.

The Angels go nowhere (again) through no fault of Trout’s or Ohtani’s own. But with eight games left to play on the season future Hall of Famer Trout still has a shot at a 40th home run or more despite missing 31 percent of the season on the injured list. (He had 37 after Tuesday.) It’s to wonder what he might have hit if he hadn’t missed that time. Would 60+ have been out of the question? We’ll never know now.

Ohtani has a shot at a 40th home run, too. (He has 34 at this writing.) He can also become the only man in Show history to have a 40 home run season at the plate and finish on the mound with an ERA and a fielding-independent pitching rate below 3.00. At this writing, Ohtani sits with 34 home runs, a 2.47 ERA, and a 2.52 FIP. Not to mention 203 pitching strikeouts and counting. Say good night, Babe.

But how long can Commissioner Nero and company shrug off the further dilution of real pennant race competition? The kind that would compel owners in all baseball cities and not just the big boys to make substantial investments in their teams, from the ground up, year in and year out? Whoops. Better not go there. We may be striking toward 21st century schizoid heresy.

Mediocrity might get World Series representation

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Yes, let’s root-root-root for the 29-31 Brewers to meet the 29-31 Astros in the World Series. Stop snarling, there is a method to such madness.

Almost half a century ago, U.S. Senator Roman Hruska of Nebraska offered a defense for Richard Nixon’s dubious Supreme Court nominee G. Harrold Carswell. It proved that with friends like Hruska the hapless Carswell didn’t need enemies. Just the way baseball proves that with friends or commissioners like Rob Manfred, it doesn’t need enemies, either.

“Even if [Carswell] were mediocre,” said Hruska, “there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they? We can’t have all Brandeises and Frankfurters and Cardozos.”

Hruska, meet Manfred and today’s major league baseball owners. For the first time since 1981’s strike-resolution postseason experiment, at least one team with a losing record enters the rounds that will end in someone winning the World Series. This time, though, it turns out to be two such teams.

Ladies and gentlemen, your 29-31, final wild card-holding Houston Astros and Milwaukee Brewers. Whose joint appearance in the World Series to come (baseball law: anything can happen—and usually does) might be less hazardous to the nation’s health than a questionable Supreme Court justice.

Manfred and the owners dreamed up this sixteen-team/twelve wild-card postseason as a way to take the financial sting out of the owners agreeing to any sort of baseball season during a pandemic that’s stung the economy overall. So far as most of us knew, it would be a one-time thing.

Well, so was the postseason resolution of the 1981 strike. It put first-and-second-half division winners against each other in division series. But it also put the overall 50-53 Kansas City Royals (second-half American League West winners) into the postseason and kept the 66-42 Cincinnati Reds (neither-half National League West winners) and the best overall season record out.

Who knew then that, a decade and a half later, the owners and the players union alike would go all-in on three-division leagues and a wild card that took the first bite of championship dilution, allowing teams who didn’t finish in first place to play into the postseason in the first place?

Manfred’s predecessor, Bud Selig, then pushed for and got the second wild card in each league starting in 2012. Until this season, only two World Series featured combatants who got into the postseason by way of the wild card, in 2002 (the Anaheim Angels beat the San Francisco Giants) and 2014. (The Giants beat the Royals.) There’s an excellent chance of it happening again next month.

Almost two weeks ago, Manfred let slip that he’d like to see this sixteen-team postseason format stick past the anomaly of the pandemic-shortened season. That happened five days after Sports Illustrated writer Stephanie Apstein said she hoped as many losing teams as possible got here this time only.

The reasonings between the two couldn’t be more opposed. Manfred told a Hofstra University virtual panel that “there was a lot to commend” this setup “and it is one of those changes I hope will become a permanent part of our landscape,” adding that “an overwhelming majority” of the owners agree.

Apstein called the setup a disgrace: “This setup dissuades teams from trying to be good. The clearer that is this year, the more likely it is that we can go back to normal next year.” She dares to dream, as does her SI colleague, Emma Baccalieri, who said, “In a non-pandemic-restricted year, ‘tolerable weirdness’ shouldn’t be the bar.”

In absolute fairness, assorted teams this year didn’t look good for assorted reasons running the spread from aborted spring training and near rush-designed “summer camps” with a three-month-plus interruption to assorted injuries, health-related opt-outs, a few COVID-19 test panics and postponements, and the usual assortment of foul balls.

But assorted teams looked good in spite of those, too. More than a few teams made baseball fun and feel-good again. Atlanta’s Freddie Freeman went from scared to death that COVID might wipe him out to likely winning the National League’s Most Valuable Player award. The Reds, the Chicago White Sox, and the Slam Diego Padres made friends and fans all over.

Well, at least the White Sox did until they went from letting the kids play (Tim Anderson especially) to Fun Police, drilling Willson Contreras for the bat flip of the century last Friday night. Must be something in the franchise water. The White Sox may have an apparent institutional genius for going from fun-fun-fun to phooey-on-you in practically a blink.

So why on earth should we pray for a World Series featuring a pair of losing season records?  There’s still the outside chance that the very sight of two losing records playing for the Promised Land might yank even Commissioner Nero’s head out from being so far up his ass he can give you the live play-by-play of his own root canal procedure. Might.

With identical losing records, and assuming they both get past the earlier rounds on the theory that even the also-rans can and do go nuclear for short spells, the Astros and the Brewers could make real that once-infamous observation that mediocrity deserved “a little” representation, too.

The Supreme Court can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters, and Cardozos? Well, baseball can’t be all the A’s, the Braves, the Chicago Cubs, the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Minnesota Twins, and the Tampa Bay Rays, to name this pandemic season’s division winners, either.

They can’t even be all the White Sox, the Padres, the Cleveland Indians, or whoever—under normal two-card circumstances—might win a playoff game between the Reds and (surprise!) the Miami Marlins. (They’d have done it tying for the second National League wild card if this had been a normal season.)

Under normal conditions the rest of the pack, never mind the bottom of it, wouldn’t be entitled to play for a little representation before baseball’s highest court. Except in their wait-till-next-year dreams.

This year’s Astros and Brewers sank from winning 2019 teams (the Astros winning the AL West, the Brewers going to the NL wild card game) to 2020 also-rans. They were compromised predominantly by the injured list, particularly as it riddled their pitching staffs and a few key position players. If mediocrity deserves representation, their pandemic season’s records mean these two playing in the World Series would be as representative as it gets.

What if it leaves Manfred still giving the live play-by-play of his own root canal work? What if it doesn’t awaken him, and those owners he says are all-in, to the abject degeneracy of a baseball postseason that invited the mediocre to play on the same field (to open, anyway) as the teams who did overcome any and all pandemic or other disruptions to rise and shine?

What if Commissioner Nero and those supporters lack the brains to ask themselves, “What’s wrong with this picture? Why did the Dodgers, the Rays, the Twins, the A’s, the Braves, and the Cubs fight tooth, fang, claw, and coronavirus to finish on top, just to have to run through most of the rest of the lesser pack all over again to play in the World Series?” And, “Why did we remove the real incentives for teams to compete just so we could still make money and lots of it?”

It’s tempting to pray that the Astros and the Brewers do find ways to meet in the Series. (Tough openings: the Astros face the Twins in this wild card round; the Brewers have to survive the Dodgers. David had better odds pitching to Goliath.) Just for the outrage factor alone. An outrage factor that would be multiplied exponentially considering the scandal-ridden Astros in Year One following the exposure and non-disciplines of Astrogate.

It might make the Brewers—who haven’t been in the World Series since Epcot opened, Marvin Gaye released the final album of his lifetime, Cats started an eighteen-year run on Broadway, and then-Communist Poland barred the Solidarity labour union—objects of affection far beyond the Milwaukee that made Schlitz famous.

The Astros may have only eight men left (Justin Verlander, pitcher, is gone to undergo and recuperate from late-life Tommy John surgery) from the Astrogate teams of 2017 and part of 2018. But that hasn’t stopped the brickbats, catcalls, and stadium seat cutout punkings from reminding them it’s not nice to commit espionage above and beyond the temptations handed down by MLB itself in the replay rooms.

Maybe an Astros-Brewers World Series would leave Manfred and his minions to answer why they thought mediocrity deserved a little postseason representation, too. Big maybe. And maybe I’ll win the Nobel Prize.

But maybe it should also make you pray that the Indians find a way through this mess to play in and win the Series at long enough last. If 2020 were a normal season, the Indians—whose tenacious righthander Shane Bieber looks like the absolute lock for the American League’s Cy Young Award this pandemic season—might have played a 163rd game against the White Sox to see who got wild card numbers one and two. (The Yankees, the Buffalonto Blue Jays, and the Astros would have been out.)

Well, as Casey Stengel once said, now wait a minute fer crissakes. Suppose this pandemic postseason shakes out to the Indians playing the Padres in the Series. The Indians haven’t won the Series since the Berlin Airlift. The last time they got to try, they lost a Game Seven thriller to the Cubs—who hadn’t won a Series since the Roosevelt Administration. (Theodore’s.)

The Padres have yet to hoist their first piece of World Series metal. The last time they got to try, Jose Samarago became Portugal’s first Nobel literature laureate, Richard Pryor won the first Mark Twain Prize for humour, Bill Clinton faced impeachment, and the Yankees weren’t anywhere near as inclined to roll over and play dead for the Padres as the Senate was for Clinton.

These words appear after Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. It almost figures that the first entry into baseball’s book of life for the year to come could make the Mad Hatter’s tea party resemble a Social Register cotillion. This time, if the proverbial cream rises to the top, a Dodgers-Rays World Series would likely do nothing but compel Manfred to proclaim validation. Told ya!

So let’s root, root, root for an Astros-Brewers World Series, no matter how you feel about the Astros otherwise. Not because mediocrity deserves a little representation, but because it might re-awaken the owners. Maybe enough to stop Commissioner Nero from consecrating the poisonous precept that a franchise doesn’t even have to try to be particularly good to earn the right to play for the Promised Land.

First some look for the curse

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Eenie, meanie, chili beanie, the spirits are about to speak! (Photo: New York Yankees.)

Just when you think you’ve seen every last exercise in abject stupidity a sports fan can indulge, you get disabused swiftly and sickeningly. Case in point: the Twitter user (I won’t dignify him by mentioning him by handle) who offered up, quote, “if you could curse any MLB player for all of October who would you choose.” The lack of question mark is his.

He even had the temerity to use a once-famous portrait of Casey Stengel, freshly hired to manage the New York Yankees for 1949, gazing agape at a baseball backlit for the viewer, as if gazing into a job-appropriate crystal ball seeking his and the Yankees’ future. The concept of putting a hex on the Yankees’ opponents wasn’t exactly the idea.

At the very least, the Twitter twit in question must have a thing for provoking observers to think about flogging dead horses. I thought I’d written my last words for a very long time about baseball curses and goats, actual or alleged, and how truly un-funny the sports goat business really is. So much for that idea.

When the Dodgers gave Vin Scully a tribute night in his final season at the microphones, Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax addressed the Dodger Stadium throng. Koufax remembered Scully slipping into church the day before a World Series and praying—not “for a win, but there would be only heroes in the World Series, no goats. He didn’t want anybody in the future to be tarnished with the fact that they lost the World Series for their team.”

Whomever Scully affected over his long and impeccable broadcasting career, Twitter Twit couldn’t possibly have been among them. A man or woman who invites you to curse the MLB player of your choice for all October isn’t someone who’d pray that the postseason would have heroes and not goats.

Later the same day as that dubious invitation, the Los Angeles Dodgers clinched the National League West. They slapped the American League West champion Oakland Athletics 7-2 Tuesday after entering the game with a magic number of two. Their freeway rivals the Los Angeles Angels, who’ve clinched yet another losing season in Mike Trout’s all-universe prime, lent them a helping hand by beating the San Diego Padres, 4-2.

Thanks largely to home runs from Max Muncy, Chris Taylor, A.J. Pollock, and Corey Seager, that’s eight straight Dodger division titles. They’d like very much not to make it an eighth straight postseason of heartbreak. Heartbreak that includes back-to-back World Series losses to a couple of teams exposed in due course as illegal, off-field-based, sign-stealing cheaters.

Even their storied Brooklyn ancestors never had it that bad. Did they?

Will the Dodgers’ rotten postseason fortune continue? Will the worst among fans continue reveling in it when not abusing them for it? (Los Angeles Daily News photo.)

Things were smaller and somewhat simpler then, but the Boys of Summer’s final decade in Brooklyn shows six pennants and one World Series triumph. Before they were those bold, colour line-breaking teams, the Dodgers spent two decades plus between World Series appearances (1920, 1941) either in or around the old National League lower division.

Those were teams that inspired sports cartoon legend Willard Mullin to represent them as circus legend Emmett Kelly’s Weary Willie hobo, after a cabbie taking Mullin to Ebbets Field asked how those bums were doing this time. The Dodgers haven’t been called the Bums since moving to Los Angeles. But no World Series rings since the Reagan Administration leaves them stuck somewhere between the Bums of 1920-1941 and the Boys of Summer who seemed to assemble great teams unable to stop the Yankee wrecking balls.

And you’d be hard pressed to find another franchise winning eight straight division titles with nothing to show for them except two pennants. Even the Atlanta Braves winning eleven straight NL Easts won three pennants and a World Series during that 1995-2005 streak. The Yankees won nine straight American League Easts from 1997-2006 and have five pennants and three World Series rings to show for it.

The Dodgers have done what some people would have thought impossible once upon a time. They’ve become baseball’s most snakebitten 21st Century team.

Sure, it’s easy to look at the ones who don’t get to win even the occasional division title. Sure, it’s easy to look back at the legendary poor boys of the 20th Century. Sure, it’s easy to lament for every St. Louis Brown and Washington Senator ever, or for every Cub from 1945 forward, every Red Sox from 1946 forward, every Phillie from 1950 forward.

Futile, Greek-tragic, or star-crossed, none of them bear the Dodgers’ surrealistic iniquity. They even have a Hall of Fame-bound pitcher who’s been the best of his generation and who wrestles inside his own formidable baseball mind with the paradox of the pitcher who once owned the earth in the regular season but shone one moment only to be murdered the next in the postseason.

Sure enough, Clayton Kershaw was one of the suggestions proffered when Twitter Twit extended his nasty invitation. As if Kershaw doesn’t have enough to overcome entering this postseason.

Including his arguable darkest postseason hour last year, when his manager Dave Roberts—not content to give him a pat on the fanny for a well-done job striking Adam Eaton out to escape a seventh-inning division series Game Five jam—sent him out for the eighth instead of his admitted choice Kenta Maeda.

When, instead, Kershaw watched Anthony Rendon send one pitch just over the left field fence and Juan Soto send his very next pitch halfway up the right field bleachers. When Roberts then reached for Maeda—and watched as sickeningly as every Dodger fan in creation when Maeda struck out the side. Too much, too little, too late.

After that division series loss, indignant Dodger fans made a show of running over Kershaw jerseys in the parking lots. On Tuesday, at Twitter Twit’s invitation, there really were those now praying for the continuing postseason takedown of a man who’s been that rarity, an off-the-charts pitcher otherwise who also happens to be a decent, nice man hard pressed to deal with off-field catcalls and snark without entertaining thoughts of manslaughter.

Point out Kershaw’s 2.15 ERA and 2.94 fielding-independent pitching this truncated season—second on the club only to Tony Gonsolin’s 1.77/2.44—and the snarkers break out the October voodoo dolls. Kershaw may be tempted to forget his unostentatious Christian faith and go to the mound with a rabbit’s foot or a good-luck troll in his pocket.

Twitter Twit and his ilk probably don’t have much awareness that baseball’s presumed goats haven’t always been allowed to put the boos and catcalls behind them when leaving the ballpark, either. In some ways, Kershaw jerseys being run over by angry Dodger fans may be one of the more polite such exercises.

How would they like to have been Bill Buckner, playing catch with the young son not yet born when he had his rendezvous with ill destiny in Game Six of the 1986 World Series? When one of the boy’s throws bounced past and, thinking only that he was being polite, said, “That’s okay, Dad, I know you have trouble with grounders.”

That’s how Buckner learned the nastiest among long-suffering Red Sox fans extended their foul play to children. He packed his family up, high-tailed it out of New England, and made for Idaho, where he went into the real estate business. His eventual reconciliation to Red Sox Nation didn’t necessarily mean he’d forget while he forgave. Not until he was stricken with the Lewy Body dementia that took his life last year.

Another ill-fated Red Sox from the same Series, relief pitcher Calvin Schiraldi, struggled enough with his punishing self-criticism and his Games Six and Seven burdens without having to run into a father and son one day in the future, the son cursing Schiraldi to his face over that Series loss, and Schiraldi horrified that the father did nothing to discipline his son for it.

A year before that Series, Don Denkinger got his after he called Kansas City’s Jorge Orta safe at first when everyone saw clearly that Orta was out by two full steps or so on the play. The St. Louis Cardinals imploded from there, of course. But the outrage over that blown call included a mental case of a radio disc jockey revealing Denkinger’s address and phone number on the air and Denkinger dealing with vandalism and death threats enough to warrant FBI protection for a spell.

Mitch (Wild Thing) Williams blew a 1993 World Series save and spent a sleepless night with his rifle in his arms over death threats (not to mention assorted carpentry nails left under the tires of his and his wife’s cars in their home driveway)—and that was before he entered Game Six and served the pitch Toronto’s Joe Carter clobbered for game, set, and World Series.

Before Buckner and Schiraldi’s ill fates, California Angels relief pitcher Donnie Moore, already a deeply troubled soul as it was, surrendered a home run to Boston’s Dave Henderson when the Angels were a strike away from going to that World Series. The sensitive righthander finally cracked under continuing abuse from fans while his career from there dissipated under injury and his marriage cracked up. In 1989 he shot his estranged wife before shooting himself. His wife survived. He didn’t.

Hall of Famer Ernie Lombardi was handed the goat horns for the 1939 World Series after the Yankees’ Charlie Keller blasted him at the plate with the score tied in the bottom of the tenth. What they called Lombardi’s Snooze was Keller built like the tank Lombardi was but nailing his groin on the play, unwittingly knocking the hapless catcher out while Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio scored behind Keller.

They also forgot Lombardi couldn’t have cost the Reds that Series—the Yankees were en route a sweep and it was Game Four. Lombardi was a gentle giant with a self-deprecating sense of humour about himself. He was also a lifelong depressive who eventually tried but failed to commit suicide in 1953.

You still think the curse/goat business is all that funny? It might have made for a small library worth of amusing and even semi-classic writing, but I’ve been to funnier muggings. (Including my own, in Washington, in December 1990.) It’s also made for unrealistic views of long-term futility. Curse of the Black Sox? Curse of the Bambino? Curse of the Billy Goat? Curse of Rocky Colavito? How about the curses of myopic or boneheaded management and administration?

Sometimes even the heroes learn the hard way that with certain brain-damaged fans achievement is a crime. Hall of Famer Babe Ruth’s two successful home run record pursuers learned the hard way. Roger Maris (single-season) and Hall of Famer Henry Aaron (career) dealt with death threats from miscreants who didn’t want either an “interloper” (Maris, as enough Yankee and other fans saw him) or a black man (Aaron) knocking the Sacred Babe to one side.

Let’s ask Twitter Twit what I often asked Joe and Jane Fan in general. Do you really think you could have done better? Do you really think you could go to your job every day with 55,000 plus at your office or your warehouse or your store or your farm surrounding you—and maybe 550 million watching you live on television?

Do you think you could make a fateful mistake or get beaten at the wrong time in front of crowds like that and just pick yourselves up, dust yourselves off, and start all over again? Would you like to go to work knowing that some other tweeter asked whom his followers would like to put a curse on at your place of business?

Don’t try telling me or anyone else you’re just going for a laugh. It isn’t all that funny to the poor soul who comes up short in the biggest of the big moment and knows his name will become synonymous with disaster for the rest of his mortal life.

We need a lot less Twitter Twit. And a lot more Vin Scully. Maybe there can’t be strictly heroes in any postseason, but maybe even today’s too-polarised Americans might think for once about putting their worst to one side and telling the Twitter Twits among us to wise up or clam up.

This bizarro postseason array to come means especially that the division champions still have to navigate—with no days off, yet—the lessers who might heat up suddenly and give them a war, if not a conquest. Once upon a time the dead-last New York Mets got thatclose to knocking the Cardinals out of a pennant on the final weekend. There’s still an outside shot of a team entering this postseason with a losing record . . . and the potential to knock a division winner out if not go all the way to the Promised Land. Funsie.

The Dodgers especially have excessive baggage to carry in without having to steel themselves for that. They’d love to make a postseason winner at last out of themselves and their Hall of Famer to be, but they know too well that one of baseball’s most irrevocable laws is, “Anything can happen—and usually does.”

So maybe the most polarised and least genial among us might yet summon up our better angel, congratulate the eventual winner, and offer the eventual defeated nothing more than, “Hey, you did your best, you came up short, it doesn’t mean we want you to have the next seat in the electric chair.”

Sure. And maybe I’ll be elected to succeed Rob Manfred.