Series! (2010s)
We end as we began, with a partial decade.
2010
The Senators/Rangers had won exactly one postseason game in the first 49 years of their existence, but this year they won the first two rounds handily, outscoring their opponents 59-32. The Giants, whose forte was winning the close ones, outscored their first two opponent by only one run, 30-29. Who would win, the unstoppable Rangers’ offense, or the Giants’ immovable pitching? The Giants scored 20 runs in their first two games, and the Giants took it in 5. 56 years of futility had ended.
2011
This was a Series for the ages, and I missed it, being out of the country on business. (There isn’t a lot of baseball televised in Buenos Aires.) The Rangers were up 3 games to 2 and 7 runs to 4 after 7 1/2 innings of game 6, and up 7-5 with two out in the ninth, before David Frees’s triple tied it up. They scored 2 in the top of the 10th, and were within an out of winning 9-8 before Lance Berkman tied it up again, Freese (what’s with that guy?) led off the bottom of the 11th with a walkoff home run. The Rangers, in the tradition of teams whose hearts were broken in game 6, went quietly in game 7.
2012
The Giants had a ridiculous first two rounds, losing the first two games of the NLDS horribly before winning the last three, and falling to down 3-1 in the NLCS before winning another three in a row. Detroit won the ALCS 4-0 behind their rotation of Verlander, Fister, Sanchez, and Scherzer. And then the magic started: the Panda hit three home runs off Verlander in game 1, making it a rout. The next three games were close, but at the end the Giants had swept.
2013
The Red Sox played the Cards again (see 1946, 1967, and 2004). Each was, unusually these days, the best team in its league (97 wins), and both had won the first two rounds without much trouble. David Ortiz has an insane Series (.688/.760/1.188), and the Sox won 4-2, giving them 3 championships in the last 10 years (also in the last 96 years.)
2014
The Royals had not made the postseason since their one and only championship in 1985, and made it only as the second wildcard. They won a game for the ages in Oakland to advance to the ALDS, and used their weapons of bunting, base-stealing, defense, relief pitching, and this thing they hadn’t bothered with all season called hitting home runs to sweep both it and the ALCS. But, as Hilaire Belloc meant to write,
Whatever happens, we have got
The Bumgarner, and they have not
And that was that.
Overall, the Giants went 3-0, the Cards 1-1, the Red Sox 1-0, and Texas 0-2, with Detroit and Kansas City 0-1.
I assume you mean the Red Sox won 4-2.
The Giants have 3 Series wins in 5 years. Where do you think that puts them historically? Are we more or less impressed by this given the ever-expanding playoff field (and I don’t remember off the top of my head if any of the years they won would have years they wouldn’t even have made the playoffs under prior formats).Report
Does the team that won in 2011 have a name?Report
Like I said, I didn’t see it. But yeah, it must.Report
They won their division in ’10 and ’12 and were tied for the wildcard this year, so there would have been a one-game playoff even without the latest rule change. But they didn’t have the best record any of those years, so they wouldn’t have advanced under pre-1969 rules. If you reconstitute the divisions that existed from 1969-1993, they advance only in 2010.
But I’m less impressed now that there’s more randomness in the system. The Giants of the 2010s are certainly not nearly as good as the Big Red Machine, which won 95+ six years out of seven and featured three of the greatest players in the history of the game, but won only two championships, or the great Earl Weaver Oriole teams, which won only one. Compared to the long struggle for dominance of the regular season, the playoffs are a crapshoot. A weak team that gets hot at the right time can beat a much better one, and often does.Report
Mike is right. Furthermore, these Giants aren’t even as good as the Giants of the 60’s, with HOF’ers Mays, McCovey, Marichal, Perry, Cepeda for part of the decade, and next tier stars Haller, Lanier, Hart and so on. That team managed only one World Series appearance, a heart-breaking loss that Mike described a few posts ago. They finished second (often to Sandy Koufax) more times than I care to count.Report
This is the beginning of a conversation I’ve had a million times. And it all depends on definitions. What does the “better team” mean? The one more successful at accomplishing their goals (i.e., winning world series), the one that more consistently performed at a high level during the regular season relative to their competition, or the one we think would be favored in a head to head match-up (which may or may not include measures to minimize the fact that current athletes, in general, are simply superior to those who played in the past).
I lean strongly toward the one that wins the most titles, but I haven’t completely made up my mind yet (and probably never will).Report
There will never be a single, universally accepted definition of “better team.” But, to repeat Mike’s point, any given baseball game contains an uncontrollable random element (dumb luck, in other words). The only way to correct for dumb luck is to play a lot of games, and wait for the Law of Large Numbers to even things out. The more you add rounds of playoffs and wild card teams the less important the long regular season becomes, and the more heavily World Series champions are influenced by dumb luck.
Joe Sportscaster: Jones called ‘heads’ and the toss came up ‘tails.’ Jones just didn’t want it badly enough.Report
I understand both your and Mike’s point. And Joe sportscaster annoys this shit out of me too. But yout point, taken to its logical conclusion, would entail eliminating the playoffs and crowning the team with the best regular season record. We don’t do that though, and I’m glad about that.
Nor do most people talk about the teams with the best regular season win %. We talk about titles. And we should.
Because while its hard to quantify, sinking an 8 ft putt to win the Masters, hitting a home run in the bottom of the 9th of game 5 of the world series, or throwing 2 td’s in the 4th quarter of the superbowl, is different, and more impressive, than a similar putt in a regular PGA event, a home run in the 5th inning of a game in may, or tossing two tds in the third week of the regular season. Rational nor not, that difference is the essence of sport.Report