Series! (2000s)
2000
The first Subway Series since the 1950s, which the Yankees won in five close games. Jeter, its MVP, was otherworldly (.409/.480/.864). This was the last championship the Yankees would win for a while, but they stayed strong. The Mets, on the other hand, took a quick ride to the cellar and have hardly been heard from since.
2001
The Diamondbacks beat the Yankees 4-3, but it took seven games only because Byung-Hyun Kim blew two 9th-inning saves (he gave up 3 home runs in 3.1 innings). In game 7, Rivera uncharacteristically returned the favor, leading to the D’backs winning a championship in only the fourth year of their existence. (The Red Sox still have the record, winning the very first Series in their third year, 1903).
2002
The Giants won the NL wildcard and marched through the playoffs, prompting a Bonds-hating sportswriter to conclude that there is no God. But they blew a 5-0 lead in game 6 when their bullpen could not stop the bleeding, and still looked dazed and confused in game 7, to give the Angels their first and so far only championship. Bonds was even more otherworldly than 2000-Jeter .at 471/.700/1.294 .
2003
The Cubs took a 3-1 lead in the NLCS, and then they remembered they were the Cubs (which their fans unfairly blamed on Steve Bartman.) The Red Sox couldn’t handle the Yankees in the ALCS. So instead of the Series we would all have loved to see, we got a pretty dreary Marline victory over the Yankees, 4-2.
2004
The Red Sox, again facing the Yankees in the ALCS, were about to be swept, down 4-3 in the bottom of the ninth, when they managed to tie it, win it in the 12th, win the next one in 14, win the next two in regulation, and then sweep the Cardinals. First championship in 86 years, and the curse of the Bambino gone for good.
2005
Not to be outdone, the White Sox swept the Astros to win their first in 88 years. The Sox, who hadn’t been particularly good the previous year, won 99 games and lost only one is the postseason. They were quite fortunate in this, having gone 35-19 in one run games, where the second-place Indians were 22-36; with more normal results, the White Sox might not have made the postseason at all. This was the Astros’ one and so far only appearance in the Series.
2006
St Louis, in what was really a terrible year for them (they dropped from 100 to 83 wins), won a horrible Central division, got hot during the postseason, and beat the Tigers 4-1. This Series was memorable mostly for the Tigers’ pitching staff suffering an epidemic of Steve Sax disease. You know something’s in the air when the Series MVP is David Eckstein.
2007
The Rockies were 4 games above .500 on September 15th. Then they won 13 of their last 14 games to tie the Padres for the wildcard, won a one-game playoff to enter the postseason, and then swept the NLDS and NLCS. That’s 21 victories in 22 games. Meanwhile, the Red Sox took 7 games to beat Cleveland in the ALCS. The result was that the Rockies had an 8-day rest before the Series started, cooled off completely, and got swept by the Sox by a combined score of 29-10.
2008
The Rays (nee Devil Rays), who had never had a .500 season, finally put it all together and won 97 games. They were a team that had been built the right way, through a strong farm system and some shrewd trades, and pretty much all of baseball was rooting for them against the high-payroll behemoths in the AL East. But the Phillies, winning only their second championship ever, beat them in five mostly close games.
2009
The Yankees, who had missed the postseason in 2008 for the first time since the strike, came back strong with a 103-win season fueled by the free-agent signings of Mark Teixeira and C.C. Sabathia. (See “high-payroll behemoths”, above.) The Phillies had made some acquisitions of their own, trading for Cliff Lee and signing Pedro Martinez, but the Yankees prevailed 4-2.
Overall, the Yankees went 2-2, the Red Sox 2-0, and the Cards Phillies and Cardinals 1-1, with half the berths going to teams that appeared only once.
I promise I’m not rubbing it in, but I remember listening to the last game of the NLDS between the Marlins and the Giants on the radio while I was driving around the southern tier of New York.
For the first time in postseason history, a series ended with the potential tying run thrown out at the plate, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.
That series inspired this epic rant by Christopher “Mad Dog” Russo on WFAN and YES, who is a Giants fan.Report
the Cards and Cardinals 1-1
The Phils and Cardinals 1-1, you mean.Report
Thanks.Report
The Pale Hose made it to the Series due, in part, to A.J. Pierzynski’s famous steal of first. This was probably one of the worst blown calls in baseball post-season history.
I remember watching the Sox-‘Stros series with my son, 9 at the time, who is a huge Sox fan and telling him he could stay up as late as he could on school nights because he might never see another one in his lifetime. Due to baseball’s insistence on night games and really long between innings breaks he seldom made it to the end of a game. This is definitely not the way to breed the next generation of fans.
The way the Sox are playing these days I may be more right in my 2005 prediction that I care to be.Report
IIRC, Eckstein was also a big part of that winning Angels team in ’02.Report
Eckstein had a career year in 2002, playing brilliant defense and having by far his best offensive year ever. He was almost as valuable as MVP Miguel Tejada, whom I presume got it because the A’s had such a great year, though not nearly as valuable as ARod and Jim Thome, who were stuck on awful teams. By 2006, he was a good, but not great SS, who could get on base reasonably well but had no speed and no power.Report