The 2023 Running Baseball Thread

On the one hand, that means the Dodgers were knocked out. And that is a very good thing. On the other, it means Harper is back in the World Series. That is less good.

May I counter with Orioles-Braves? Still all East Coast. Still storied franchises. Still a fun National League team.

 

What an absolute dud of a first round. Hopefully the second one is better. Low bar to clear there.

 

The Rays didn't have 99 problems but the Rangers were one.

 

I want to be mature in loss. Handle it like a pro.

So understand my restraint when I say I want to beat someone's ass for putting Jesse Winker on a playoff roster. Not the reason the Brewers lost by any means, but it sure as hell didn't help.

In the AL, go Twins. In the NL? Go Meteor From Space.

 

11 years ago today, 10/5/12, Chipper's last AB, a broken bat single.

 

That Orioles-Rangers game was the first wild card in AL history:

The Orioles scored their first run of the inaugural AL wild-card game when J. J. Hardy knocked in Nate McLouth, who reached second on first baseman Michael Young's error, with his RBI single. The Rangers answered in the same frame when Ian Kinsler scored on a double play grounder by Josh Hamilton with runners on first and third. After the first inning, both starters, Joe Saunders and Yu Darvish, pitched shutout baseball until the sixth inning when Adam Jones knocked in a run via a sacrifice fly after back-to-back singles by Hardy and Chris Davis. Darvish was charged with another run in the seventh via a Nate McLouth RBI single after a leadoff single by Ryan Flaherty and sacrifice bunt by Manny Machado. The Oriole relievers would prove enough to take care of the Rangers lineup the rest of the way. The Orioles scored two insurance runs off of Joe Nathan in the final frame on a leadoff double by Robert Andino, RBI single by Machado, and sacrifice fly McLouth to extend their lead to 5–1. In the end, Jim Johnson finished the Rangers off in the 9th despite them giving Baltimore a scare on having the bases loaded and two down. However, Johnson got David Murphy to fly out to McLouth, preserving the victory.
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2012 Wild Card Game - Baltimore Orioles over Texas Rangers (1-0) | Baseball-Reference.com

 

Unpopular counterpoint:


Major league baseball was better and more exciting when it rewarded the long haul of an entire season's excellence.

Playoffs - especially 'wild card' playoffs - short-circuit that by rewarding one- or two-game hot streaks.

So why bother with a 162-game season?

 

Economically, baseball's biggest strength and biggest weakness is inventory. It's got a lot of games to sell. I am old enough to remember quite well the days of regular season immediately followed by World Series. A team good enough to win 90 games in a league with a 100-game winner had a lot of inventory had that was hard to move in September. And of course, now tjere are 30 teams, not 16 or 20. So let's say baseball went back to two leagues, four divisions, playoff series, then World Series. In the National League, we'd have been reading Braves=Dodgers matchup previews for the last two months. On the other hand, both AL divisions would've had exiting pennant races, so they wouldn't have had as much trouble moving inventory.But in the old days, exciting September stretch drives were very much more the exception than the rule.

The current playoffs are too long.. That's just a fact. Once a fan's team is eliminated, he or she loses interest completely, at least this fan does. It's not good for a sport's brand to have its championship event become an anticlimax. But the cruel demands of inventory mean that playoff expansion/dilutiom was inevitable.

BTW even if every series was to go the maximum, MLB's playoffs are still smaller in comparison to the regular season than the other three major pro sports. The maximum niumber of games needed to win a title is 22, a little over one-eighth of the regular season. NFL is four compared to 17. NBA and NHL are 28 compared to 82. That's more than a third.

 

Four sweeps. Huh.

 

I like that there is still a massive incentive to win your division and play well throughout the season to stay out of that round. If baseball went to a straight 1-8 seeding like the NBA, opening your best team to having one bad weekend and being eliminated, that would suck. At least Baltimore, Atlanta, L.A., and Houston will have to lose three times to get bounced, which is far less random than having two bad games like in the wild-card round. Still random, but not quite as crazy.

 

Brewers won their division.

 

Correa is 6'4. He looks bigger in a Twins uniform.