IMAGINE GOING 101-61 — HELLO, METS — AND GOING HOME IN 27 HOURS
The MLB season is disproportionate to any fairness quotient, packing 162 games into six months, then shrugging when a regular-season alpha dog is quickly quashed in an unforgiving new playoff format
The Commissioner’s Trophy, remember, is a mere “piece of metal.” The commissioner said so himself not long ago, diminishing the magnitude of the World Series with one egregious, inexcusable comment. So why would Rob Manfred care that Major League Baseball’s postseason is ghastly unfair — grotesquely disproportionate to an excruciating, slog-and-drag regular season that spans six months?
In a matter of days, before anyone realizes Joe Buck has left the booth (and that John Smoltz unfortunately remains), a 100-victory team will have been eliminated from the playoffs. It’s unconscionable that an outstanding season, from early April to early October, conceivably could vanish with two successive losses this weekend in the Wild Card round, a death of roughly 27 hours. Even if the 100-win team survives the immediate best-of-three challenge, it could be extinguished in five games or fewer in the Division round.
Such a loser could be the New York Mets, not that many will shed tears for a franchise with an MLB-high payroll fed by multi-billionaire owner Steve Cohen. Or, even more preposterously, that forlorn bawlclub could be the Los Angeles Dodgers, who happen to be the first National League team since 1909 to crash the 110-victory barrier, with an astounding 95 of their 111 wins coming by multiple runs, an all-time record. At this point, if the Mets advance beyond 89-win San Diego while the Dodgers enjoy an eminently deserved rest period, a bi-coastal megaseries awaits.
Mets: 101-61, $273.9 million payroll, the team of Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom and Francisco Lindor and Edwin Diaz, the trumpet-inspired closer with the best entrance music in sports.
Dodgers: 111-51, $267.2 million payroll, the team of Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman and Trea Turner and Clayton Kershaw and Julio Urias, a superfranchise blessed with enough resources to endure injuries, career downturns and the rough-sex suspension of Trevor Bauer.
And one behemoth will be sent home by mid-month, believe it or not, in as few as three NLDS games.
Am I the only one having trouble wrapping arms and brain cells around baseball’s new math? What is the point of mastering a 162-game schedule when you can be ziggied in a handful of innings? I realize the postseason is intended to be a gauntlet, but in a more sensible and equitable paradigm, MLB would chop 20 games off the regular season and elongate the postseason. That way, every playoff series would be a more credible and spaced-out best-of-seven; the fluke factor would shrink; and much more importance would be assigned to October, as it should be.
If the curmudgeons-in-charge finally have installed a pitch clock and banned defensive shifts, why can’t they address the hideous imbalance of their calendar? If they’re at last addressing the sport’s pace-and-inertia crisis, then blow up the traditional season, too. The NFL never would have such an issue with a 17-game regular season. The NBA and NHL have their playoff shockers, now and then, but with 82- and 80-game regular seasons, the accompanying jolt to the system doesn’t feel like a sucker punch.
In part because MLB has a poisonous tanking issue that created a top-heavy tier of “haves’’ in the NL — a league with seven teams that weren’t trying in 2022 — the Mets had the misfortune of sharing a division with the blistering Atlanta Braves. Hellbent on becoming baseball’s first repeat World Series champion in 22 years, the Braves overcame a 10 1/2-game deficit to overtake the Mets in the East. Regardless of the format, the Mets have to go through Dodger Stadium and Truist Park to win the pennant. But how about ensuring their playoff stay longer with a seven-game series each step? With a 142-game regular season, MLB could start the postseason in mid-September, maintain eyeballs for a month and a half and demand higher fees from their broadcast partners. Why must I do all the thinking for Manfred and the owners? They don’t deserve my help, having created an even more condensed, jumbled playoff schedule this year thanks to their 99-day labor lockout.
Of course, I am dreaming. Such a disruption never would fly among the many tanking teams in both leagues, who need to soak every dead revenue cent from all home dates, though their seasons were effectively finished in May. It’s criminal to think Pittsburgh, Oakland, Cincinnati and Miami will be packing for the winter only days before the Mets or Dodgers do the same.
Listen to manager Buck Showalter, the toast of New York until the Braves blew past his Mets with a 78-33 tear since early June. How are his dazed troops feeling heading into a quick, dangerous series against Manny Machado, Juan Soto and the Padres, who will throw white-hot Yu Darvish in Game 1? “How do you think?” Showalter shot back. “Someone said: ‘Are they pressing?’ Of course they’re pressing. God, it’s a tough ride. I know how much they care. I know how much the fans care. You hate to disappoint people. It hurts.”
He sounds whipped already. “I have expectations of the Mets being the last team standing. What else is there? I mean, that's why we get up in the morning every day. It's kind of cold. It's kind of cruel, but I'd rather know it up front what the endgame's supposed to be,” Showalter said. “Some people go through their whole life not knowing exactly what success is supposed to be. Nobody's got to in here tell me how we're doing. There’s a scoreboard and standings. It's right there. You don't like it, play better.”
Imagine being the Dodgers, who have bludgeoned the competition with the highest run differential since the 1939 New York Yankees, and not even reaching the NL championship series? If Scherzer, deGrom and Chris Bassitt rule the mound in a best-of-5, against a less imposing Dodgers rotation and an ongoing closer conundrum in Chavez Ravine, a team that has won at least 106 games in the last three non-pandemic regular seasons could be the latest Hollywood tragedy. No wonder manager Dave Roberts cringes when told the fan base, part-spoiled and part-underserved, doesn’t care much about triple-digit springtimes and summers if not followed by autumn glory.
“Fans are fans for a reason, they've never put on a big league uniform,” Roberts told reporters this week. “We want to win a championship just as much as they do. If not more, our jobs depend on it. We're in the grind every single day from Feb. 15, every single day.
“So there are fans, some subset that feel they don't get interested until the postseason and the season is defined by that. That's their prerogative. There's another subset of fans that can appreciate what goes into winning, having the season we're having and understanding that there's a lot of things that happen that play out in a postseason that are unpredictable … that subset that's in it with us and really appreciates that this is a great team. And they're prepared to handle any result.”
When Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Plaschke asked if some part of Roberts would love being transported to Seattle, where the Mariners broke the longest playoff-less drought in major pro sports and are headed to the American League postseason for the first time in 21 years, he couldn’t say yes quickly enough. “Unfortunately, the world has gone very cynical, which is sad,” Roberts said. “Are certain fans, not all, jaded? Absolutely. And (they) don't realize what it takes, what this team, in particular, has had to overcome, to get to this point.”
Those tired of the sport’s spending disparity, a gap more whopping than ever, might say the Mets and Dodgers deserve to sweat. The Yankees, too, with their $254.4 million payroll. Behold the 92-win Cleveland Guardians, they of the $66.4 million payroll and the majors’ youngest roster. They hit only 127 home runs — barely more than doubling Aaron Judge — while emphasizing smallball and fundamentals and putting the ball in play, a throwback to purer days. Wouldn’t it be fascinating if they scared the pinstripes off the Yankees in the AL Divisional round?
“This team’s good. We’re not just young. We’re pretty good,” pitcher Cal Quantrill said. “I don’t think anybody’s excited to face us right now. We’re playing our best baseball. We’re playing baseball the right way.”
They are the embodiment of Terry Francona, who is 63 with a history of health problems but never has managed younger. “For what our guys did, and when you’re doing it with people that you absolutely care about and love and respect, it means a lot,” he said. But the Guardians could be quick-nixed, too, by a Tampa Bay club savvy in the ways of October.
The protracted tease is ruthless and fraught, so sinister, locking fans into a slow ride as a year’s seasons change from cold to broiling to cool. Then, as the narrative finally lifts toward a crescendo, the movie ends abruptly. Everyone is told to go home while the owners count their money.
This is SO baseball, isn’t it?
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.