Look – I love baseball – so tonight was fantastic – I have an interest in four teams that had games tonight. Three of them I wanted to see lose, one I wanted to see win. The three teams I disklike? All were at different points 2 outs away from winning, two of them were as close as 1 strike away from winning, and one was winning 7-0 with two innings to play. Yet despite all this, the Yankees, Red Sox, and Braves all lost. The one team I have an interest in and want to see win? They won 8-0. But I was conflicted in my enjoyment of such a rare and exciting occurrence that led to the American League wild card being ‘won’ by Tampa (and hence not by the Boston Red Sox), and the National League wild card being ‘won’ by my hometown St. Louis Cardinals.
I hope I can be forgiven for being solipsistic, but what happened tonight must have been designed by Bud Selig himself in order to undermine my will to rage against the 1994 addition of a wild-card round to the Major League Baseball playoffs. Something I have despised for as long as it has existed.
"The Cardinals Win the Wild Card!!" - sounds kind of stupid, doesn't it?
I have always felt that pennant races are an vital part of the fabric of what makes baseball compelling. I subscribe to ideas such as: baseball is not the spectacle that football, basketball, or hockey is; baseball requires more patience; baseball is more dependent on the numbers and a larger sample size
Rain Man - amazing to watch
(I mean, watch Shawn Kemp in ’96 for 5 minutes and you knew what made him special, but you would have had to watch Tony Gwynn in ’94 for weeks, nay months, to appreciate what made him the best hitter in baseball that year – in fact – out of uniform, he didn’t even look like an athete);
Tony Gwynn - top athlete?
bad teams beat good teams more often in baseball than in other sports, so…
I’ve believed that when you take a large sample size – say 162 games – where two teams play exactly the same schedule,whoever finishes with an inferior record should be eliminated before any playoff commences. There are a lot of other reasons why this is a good idea and I’ve had arguments with many others about this – but for now it’s suffice to say: I hate the wild card.
So when the team that I care about most the St. Louis Cardinals, finishes an incredible month by qualifying for the playoffs by catching a team that had has had a historically improbable high level of futility. And accomplishes this on a night when the team we were always chasing, was one one inning from winning.
Then a team that I don’t paticularly like – finishes an even more improbably awful strech of futility and will now instigate a long period of self-loathing that I have to admit I will enjoy just a little bit. In paticular because the Boston Red Sox have tons of money to spend, get tons of national attention, and have an annoyingly smug fan base. But if I’m being honest – my animosity was triggered in 2004 when I was living in The Gambia and my sister, who grew up in St. Louis along with me but threw her allegance in with her new adopted hipper trendier place of residece by finishing a letter she wrote to me with a taunting, smug, bandwagony, salutation: “but love them Red Sox” after the Boston Red Sox swept the Cardinals in 2004. I saved it. I dug it out tonight because I’m bitter and paticularly disliked that part of the letter. Plus it was really annoying to watch NESN here in Boston for the past month and put up with all the “We are Red Sox Nation” / “Destination: October” commercials. It’s pompous.
From my sister of all people...
So even though tonight – my team qualified for the playoffs – even though I believe that they don’t deserve a potential chance to knock out the Brewers – I am excited that my team had a chance tonight. Again, a team that was massively superior to St. Louis over a large sample of games with the same schedule (162 games) the Cards could have the chance to undo all that over the relativly random seven game set. But, of course, without the wild card – none of this would have happened. Stil doesn’t make it right.
AND
In the same way, the Red Sox should not have even had the chance to make the playoffs since the Yankees pulled away in Sepetember having played the same schedule over 6 months. But now the Red Sox have completely imploded and everyone here is quiet and the snark/pompousness/has gone from 11 down to 8.
"Greatest Team Ever"
It will never make up for losing the World Series in 2004, but tonight was awesome – and it was made entirely possible by something I despise with every fibre of my baseball existence.
Now…go Cards!
