The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is right.
I, too, am nervous about the eerily familiar sensation in the pits of our stomachs right now. It really does feel like last year, doesn't it?
Actually, last year wasn't the first time I've felt this. That would be the second half of 1969, You can make a case that the Baltimore Orioles that year might possibly be a little better personnel-wise than the Cubs, but nobody else was close. Yet...well, you know what happened. They played like a last-place Little League team and an underrated but still far inferior Mets club ended up winning it all, even beating the Orioles in the World Series.
I've gone on rants before about there being a reason why they play such a long season in baseball as compared to other sports. As the cliche goes, every team in baseball wins a third of their games, and every team in baseball loses a third of their games. What separates the 1927 Yankees from the original Mets is what they do in the remaining third.
There is no such thing as an upset in baseball. There were no nationwide headlines when the Fish split a series with us or the Reds made us look like bush leaguers yesterday. I regularly point all this out to make the case that the multiplicity of post-season playoff series typically ruins the whole game and is directly responsible for football and basketball having passed baseball in popularity. It's not just that everybody is bored with post-season baseball by the time the World Series comes around. It's that any individual baseball game is in the nature of a crap shoot, and quality only begins to assert itself in the long haul. There are too many temporary variables in the game, and too large a role played by sheer luck, to pretend that any short series can be a real test of who is the better team. It takes a season for that. And the best-three-out-of-five first round of the MLB playoffs is an abomination. You might as well toss a coin. In most years, the teams that end up in the World Series get there as much by luck as by merit. One best-of-seven series at the end of the year might be unavoidable, but multiple ones, the first being even shorter, turn the whole thing into a joke.
Well, the same principle applies here. However nervous the Cubs' mediocre beginning might have made us, and however we expected them to come out of the gate the way the 2016 edition of the club did, five games are just too small a sample to mean anything at all. If they're still hovering around .500 late next month, it will be time to be concerned. If the pattern persists into June or July comparisons with last year will be appropriate.
Until then, it's worth bearing in mind that a team this laden with power is going to strike out a lot and that it shouldn't surprise us that situational hitting has been our Achilles' heel. Stretches like this are going to happen to a team like ours. With all respect to Houston and their overly cocky pitchers, they are not going to have the same kind of year they did last year. I still see the Yankees as our chief obstacle to winning two World Series in three years- and it wouldn't surprise me if the Yankees also ran into some stretches like this before the season is over.
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