The Diamond Fan

Who would have thought?  This year’s World Series matches up a franchise that has never been there before with one that has been the loosingest team in MLB history and only won one W.S. title in its entire existence, which spans 125 years.  The Phillies were not that much of a long shot at the beginning of the season, but anybody who says they saw this coming from the young Rays back at the beginning of the season is lying.  Heck, I thought I was going out on a limb when I predicted they would have a winning season.

Be that as it may, what we have here is a matchup of two deserving teams and what promises to be a competitive and interesting series.  My predictive powers when it comes to baseball are certainly questionable, but here’s my take on the important factors in how this will play out.

Tampa Bay Rays

Why they can win: A good lineup from top to bottom, with no real easy outs.  No superstars, but Evan Longoria, Carlos Pena and Carl Crawford make a good heart of the order.  Three solid starters, and a bullpen that usually gets the job done is what you need in a postseason pitching staff. The addition of David Price is just enough to put them over the top.  He may be their best option to close games.

Why they might not win:  The bullpen is not overpowering and they cannot afford any blown seven-run leads like they had in Boston.  Defensively they are solid, but showed themselves to be prone to lapses in the ALCS.

Philadephia Phillies

Why they can win:  The top of the batting order is top notch.  Rollins and Howard are both recent MVPs who did not play up to their talent in the NLCS.  Chase Utley is perhaps the best player on the field for either team.  They have the better bullpen, and the best starting pitcher in Cole Hamels.  That is usually a winning combination in a short series.

Why they might not win: The bottom of the batting order is a black hole of out-making that offers an escape hatch to the Rays’ young starters if they get in trouble.  If you compare the teams position by position the Rays are simply a better team all around, and the Phillies bench is no great shakes.

Prediction:  I think the Phillies will put up a good fight but the Rays are the likely winners.  I’ll say Rays in seven.

The Phils have looked for all the world like the best team in the N.L. in the postseason and they are definitely a deserving champion.  The Dodgers came into the NLCS playing well and I expected a close series, but Philadelphia certainly looked like the better team in dispatching the Dodgers in five games.

The Dodgers didn’t play all that poorly, except for Furcal’s inexplicable defensive lapses in the fifth inning of tonight’s game, plus a complete lack of clutch hitting.  But the Phillies ere just better all around: more reliable starting pitching, solid defense, home runs galore just when they were needed, and a bullpen that was lights out.

In recent years, most of the time going into the World Series it has looked like it is the A.L. team’s series to lose, but this year the National League Phillies just may be the best team going.  Either the Red Sox or the Rays are going to have their hands full.

With the White Sox winning a tense victory over the Twins the field is finally set for the American League playoffs.  In contrast to the National League field, this group is comprised mostly of teams that have had great success recently (with the notable exception of the Rays, of course).

• The Red Sox, White Sox and Angels have all won World Series titles this decade (the Red Sox twice). Between them they have four World Series appearances (all victories), as opposed to none for the four NL playoff teams.
• Between them the three teams have 10 playoff appearances this decade (versus five for the NL contenders).
• Of course, prior to this decade these franchises all suffered from a notable lack of success. The Red Sox “curse” is well known, and the White Sox had not won a championship since before the notorious Black Sox scandal of 1919.  The Angels’ pennant in 2002 was the first ever for the team.

So, while based on recent events the Rays have to be your team if you like to cheer for the underdog, longtime fans of the other three teams may rightfully feel they still have some making up to do for long years of championship drought.

I just hope the Tampa Bay fans show up to see their excellent young team compete in what should be an exciting playoff. The Angels-Red Sox matchup is one of the best first round pairings ever.

We will have to wait for the AL Central race to sort itself out before the playoff field is completely set, but now we at least know the parings for the National League.  A few random thoughts:

• Whoever wins the LCS and goes on to the World Series, it will be something of a novelty.  The most recent of the four franchises to make it to the World Series was the Philadelphia Phillies of 1993, who lost the series to the Toronto Blue Jays in six games.  A listing of the four, with year of last appearance in the World Series (and last WS win):
  • Philadelphia Phillies 1993 (1980)
  • Los Angeles Dodgers 1988 (1988)
  • Milwaukee Brewers 1982 (the Brewers have never won a series; Milwaukee last had a WS champion in 1957)
  • Chicago Cubs 1945 (1908)
• The Cubs and Phillies both made the playoff field last year (both lost in the first round), but during the nine years of the Aughts so far (2000-2009) there have been only five appearances by these franchises in the playoffs: the Cubs twice (2003 and 2007), the Dodgers twice (2004 and 2006), and the Phillies once (2007).  Only one (the 2003 Cubs) advanced beyond the first round.
• This is the fifth time (of 14) since the Wild Card was instituted that the NL Wild Card has come from the Central Division.  Not counting the strike-shortened 1995 season, only one time has a team won the NL Wild Card with fewer victories than the 2008 Brewers’ 90 (the 2006 Dodgers, who won 88).  Several other Wild Cards have gotten in with just 90 wins, most recently last year’s Rockies.

So while the Cubs (”cursed” and without a championship in a century) will rightfully be the sentimental favorites, whoever wins out to the World Series it will represent a breakthrough for a franchise that has had very little success in recent years.

Should be fun!

Hank Steinbrenner, the inheritor of the New York Yankees, has a column in this week’s Sporting News in which he bemoans the current playoff system in baseball.  He singles out the Dodgers, this year’s winner of the NL West, as being unworthy of being in the playoffs.  I suppose that now that the Yankees were unable to buy their way into the playoffs for the first time in 13 years the system is a “mess that needs to be cleaned up.”  His basic premise is that only the “best” teams should get into the playoffs and in his mind most of the “best” teams are in the AL East.

His proposed solution is to do away with divisions and just take the four best winning percentages in each league an put them into the playoffs, a sort of poor man’s NBA system.  This is such a breathtakingly stupid idea that it could only come from a man who got his position based on his ancestry instead of his thinking.

Let me get this straight: you want to take the one single thing that baseball still has going for it in comparison to the other sports (the pennant race) and do away with it entirely.  Poof, bang, ka-pow! Gone. No more pennant races.  No more Red Sox- Yankees in the summer of ‘49 or in 1978, no more Dodgers-Giants in ‘51, ‘62 or any number of other years.  No more Joe Morgan hitting a home run in San Francisco to put a dagger in the hated Dodgers at the end of the ‘82 season.  No more Cubs-Mets in 1969, no more Braves coming from 2 games back in 1991 to win their first division title in a decade.  Yeah, great idea, Hank.  Let’s turn baseball’s regular season into the same semi-exhibition season we get in the NBA.  No point in trying to WIN a pennant, just finish in the upper echelon and we’ll be OK.  Let the best teams spend September gearing up for the real show instead of competing for a title.  If you want baseball to fall even further behind the NFL in popularity than it already is, I couldn’t think of a better way to do it.

Look, I would be the first to admit that this year there are probably five or six American League teams that are better on paper than the Dodgers.  So what?  The Dodgers knew what they had to do to win this season and they did it.  That’s W-I-N, not finish fourth.  Now they get a shot in the playoffs, as they should.  I hate to break it to you, Hank, but there was a very long period of time in the 60s and 70s when the very best American League team would have been no better than 5th or sixth best in the National League, due mostly to the league’s relative slowness to integrate.  Again, so what?  Some of those American League teams managed to come thorough in the Series and win, and as far as I’m concerned they deserve to be remembered as champions.  They won, and as you say, “it’s all about wins.”  They won their division, they won their League Championship Series, they won the World Series.  They were (and are) champions.  They didn’t finish in fourth freakin’ place and then get hot at the right time. Give me a break!

Steinbrenner is right in one respect: the current playoff system is not the best.  But his proposed solution is 1,000% worse.  My preference would be be to go back to two divisions in each league and just have a League Championship Series. Champion versus champion to determine the league’s representative in the World Series.  It’s not gonna happen, because the playoffs are such a cash cow for MLB, so I’ll accept the current eight team playoff with most of the teams coming in as division winners.  I can’t abide any kind of “finish fourth and you’re golden” garbage.

The real problem is that currently teams in the same division don’t play exactly the same schedule, mostly due to inter-league play.  This makes for a somewhat unlevel playing field, but the good thing is that a 162 game season levels things out quite a bit, especially compared to the element of chance that exists in a short playoff series.  In my mind, anything that reduces the significance of baseball’s regular season is bad, bad, bad, and should be avoided at all cost.

Shame on you, Whinebrenner!  Stop bitching and enjoy watching the division winners (there’s that “win” word again) and the single most worthy non-winner in each league compete for the right to be called champion.