Baseball's vacant world championship
But I'm very much afraid that, knowing full well how little it matters, I cannot regard them as world champions, for the same reason I could not acknowledge that title for the 1997 and 2003 Florida Marlins, the 2002 Anaheim Angels, or the 2004 Boston Red Sox.
There is a reason why they play a 162 game season in baseball. There are no upsets in this game. It takes that long of a season to really prove anything in baseball. True, even in the good old days they played a single, best-of-seven World Series between the two pennant winners. But even that was pushing it to the max. At the level at which major league teams- even the bad ones- play, a short series doesn't really prove much. One might justify allowing the element of luck or chance to play its role in determining a world champion in a single best-of-seven series between two teams which have proven themselves the best in their league over the course of the regular season. But except as a tie-breaker for a regular season result, to employ even a second short post-season series is to rob the result of all real integrity.
To make the ultimate champion win three such series - one of them a farcical best-three-out-of-five- is to rob both the process and the championship itself of all credibility.
A short series proves virtually nothing in baseball. It's at least as much about luck and how hot or cold a team is than it is about merit. A gauntlet formed by a series of short series proves very little more. Baseball is a game of hot streaks and cold streaks, of arbitrary influences that tend to even out over the length of a season, but simply don't have the chance to in a single series. Piling series upon series doesn't lessen the element of blind chance; it merely increases its opportunity to assert itself. And the abomination of starting off with a best-three-out-of-five series- you might as well toss a coin- makes things even worse. In the present state of post-season affairs, one cold streak- even losing three of the right five games- is fatal even for a team that has dominated throughout the season.
The present structure of the MLB post-season is a joke. There's no getting around it: the best test of a baseball team is the long regular season, and there's an ugly cynicism about throwing the result of the regular season out on the basis of a single best-of-five series. The motivator here is pretty much the same as the issue in the players' strike several years ago: greed. More teams in the running late in the season means greater profits for everybody, whether those teams deserve to be in the running or not. And three post-season series can't help but be more remunerative than only one.
Of course, there is a downside: people tend to stop watching by the time the World Series comes around. What was once the highlight of the sporting year now takes third place behind the Super Bowl and the NBA playoffs, and deservedly so: it's no longer much of a spectacle. Who, after all, can be all that excited by a series between, say, the third and fifth best teams in baseball, especially at a time when the country is suffering from post-season baseball fatigue?
And then, there's the crowning insult, the one that makes it impossible for me to recognize the 1997 and 2003 Marlins, the 2002 Anaheim Angels, the 2004 Red Sox, or the 2011 Cardinals as world champions: the wild card. There is simply no way that a team which has failed in the best possible test- the regular season- in its quest to become champion of its own division deserves to even be in the World Series, no matter how well it fares in Major League Baseball's post-season crap shoot. And there is no way that a team that failed in its season-long quest to become champions of its own division can possibly deserve to be regarded as champions of the world.
The kind of post-season baseball currently operates works well enough in football or hockey, in the first case because the better team generally wins even a single game and in the second case because prevailing in the meritocracy of the high-pressure and scrupulously fair NHL playoff gauntlet is, if anything, even a greater accomplishment than winning in the regular season. But baseball is a game whose very nature is such that it takes 162 games to prove your mettle, and the element of chance so prevalent in the present playoff structure (because so prevalent in any single game, or short series of games) renders baseball's post-season even less redemptive than it would be otherwise of a failure to qualify as deserving of the title "champion" in the best test of all: the regular season.
And now, they're talking about adding a second wild card. From there, there's only one step left: throwing out the regular season entirely, putting the names of all the teams- even the ones that finish in the cellar- into a hat, and having a blind-folded blonde simply draw out the names of the teams that get to play in October.
There is one situation, in any case, in which, should my Cubs ever get to the World Series again, I would root against them: if they get there as a wild card "winner."
The only disgrace greater than not having won the World Series since 1908 would be to finally win it when they have no moral right to be there in the first place.
Comments