One Game Wildcards in Baseball?

There has been much talk about Major League Baseball's rule change this year adding a second wild card team in each league and having the two wildcard teams play a one game playoff to determine which one moves forward. By the nature of the game of baseball a one game playoff seems like a bad idea. Ask a Red Sox fan from 1978 how he feels about a one game playoff but the truth is for those teams that win any such game the format works just fine. Major League Baseball wanted to bring more teams into the playoff hunt, and this move was a great success in that regard, but they really could not extend the postseason into November. As it is should a team in the Northern tier make the World Series you face the very real prospect of freezing temperatures and or snow. Another factor, though one not talked about as much was to increase the value of winning a division. Too many times in the recent past have two teams in the same division been within range of each other on the final week, but both being assured of making the playoffs of at worst a wildcard berth, resting players and not putting full effort into victory. For me I think the one game wildcard is a great idea. I would like to do everything I could to increase the value of the Division championship. The percentage of wildcard teams winning the World Series has shown that getting hot at the end of a season gives one a chance to win the Series that more than makes up for the loss of home field in a deciding seventh game. By making the wildcard game a crap-shoot, yes you negate the effects of a season of success to just one game, but one should consider this, does not the loss of one home game for a wildcard team as a small and insignificant penalty, negate the the effect of the season for the division championship. I would go so far as to in the Division series round of the playoffs where the eventual wildcard winner plays the top seed to limit the wildcard teams home games in this series. I think that if you win the division in a 162 game season it has to give ou a significant advantage. Another problem which I believe baseball is trying to correct but needs to make sure they do is to limit the offdays in the playoffs. A couple of years ago the Yankees won the World Series on a three man rotation. Not just in the series but throughout the playoffs. Now they deserve all the credit in the world but to me the Playoffs should embrace and reward the same things which lead to success in the regular season. If all season long you have a five man rotation that is deeper than most and less top heavy then in the postseason you are a severe disadvantage. No other sport rewards a team in the playoffs for being set up to win in a way that would not be successful in the regular season. The playoff games yesterday were competitive and while it is possible that the outcome might be different in a longer series there is no guarantee of such. I wholeheartedly endorse this approach.

That Did Not Take Long ( Sorry Bobby)

Early in the year we heard that the Bobby Valentine story would have a really good ending or it would be an epic disaster. Now that we know the answer to that question it was good to see that the Red Sox made a quick decision today. That said anyone that thinks that the Red Sox will be better right away with a new manager is sadly mistaken. This is a team that over the course of three years has changed their franchise in every way, making mistake after mistake. It will not be fixed right away. Case in point. In Texas right now the Rangers have a third baseman named Adrian Beltre who for the last two years has been one of the best players in baseball. When he was with the Red Sox he did nothing less than that and yet when he became a free agent the Red Sox made no real effort to sign him. Instead the Sox traded two high prospects including the now budding superstar Anthony Rizzo for Adrian Gonzales and paid him at least twice what they would have had to pay Beltre. Would not Youkilis and Beltre have performed at the same rate as Gonzales and Youkilis did. Certainly Will Middlebrooks was a glimmer in the Red Sox eye at the time. This was simply a decision that the Red Sox forced upon themselves. They became so infatuated with the idea of a player that they simply made a bad decision. What makes this doubly frustrating for Red Sox fans is this is the team who made a practice of doing just the opposite. No matter how much the Sox fanbase loved and respected players like Johnny Damon and Pedro Martinez, for example, the Sox drew a line in the sand that they would not cross. The Sox cannot play nickel and dime baseball, the fanbase will not stand for it, but nor can they behave like a drunk at last call and scoop up the best " available" player instead of being patient for the right player. Sox brass needs to come clean and admit this might take more than one winter to correct. One gesture could be to lower ticket prices across the board for a season, to thank the fans for their patience. As the Sox look for a manager lets hope they make a good choice here as well. This love affair from a distance for John Farrell feels uncomfortably like their pursuit of Adrian Gonzales and could suffer the same fate. I believe they need to bring in new blood but someone low key that the players will respect. John Farrell has not performed miracles in Toronto and their is no reason to believe he would in Boston. It should be an interesting winter.

Playoffs

As we go to the last day of the season the five seeds in the American League are undetermined. The Red Sox still have a chance to knock the Yankees into the one game playoff, an event that would be remarkable considering where they were just two months ago. Even stranger an Athletics victory today would put the Texas Rangers in that one game playoff. The prospect of Oakland and Baltimore winning the divisions and the Rangers and Yankees in the one game playoff is exciting beyond compare. This could be a day to remember.

The Last Day of the Season

Unless you are in Texas it is hard to imagine any baseball fan not hoping for the Oakland A's to be successful in pulling off one of the most remarkable comebacks in baseball history. The A's, now tied for first place, and now facing a winner take all game with the Texas Rangers, have won 67 of their last 100 games. What is most remarkable is how they have done it. The hero last night was Johnny Gomes. Gomes who I have over the years picked up a few times for short periods of time for my fantasy baseball teams, as he is notoriously streaky, seems to have found a home in Oakland. Over the years various managers, Tony Larussa, comes to mind, have used platoons to succeed. As a long time baseball fan I can still remember the platoon of John Lowenstein and Gary Roenicke for the great Baltimore Orioles of the early eighties. Still what Oakland does takes it to another level. With righthanders like Chris Carter, the aforementioned Gomes, Josh Donaldson and lefties like Brandon Moss and Seth Smith the A's seem to be a team with no ego's and no set lineup. Even more incredible is the fact that all five starters for the A's are rookie pitchers. AJ Griffin, Travis Blackley, Tommy Milone, Jared Parker, and Daniel Straily currently make up the rotation. This team simply does not lose. The Rangers on the other hand look like a team that is tired and desperate to hang on. It is hard to see them finding energy to compete even once they get to the playoffs. Josh Hamilton will be a free agent at the end of this year and while I suspect the Rangers will make a show of trying to keep him it is destined to fail. Hamilton who, my guess with his constant injury problems, caffeine crisis, and recently missing five critical games with a sinus infection, will soon realize that his market will be limited. New York, Boston and the like would eat him alive and the Rangers might well be ready to make some changes. If I were a betting man I would predict he ends up someplace on the West Coast in a city that starts with the prefix San.

Baseball Notes

Prince Fielder has missed one game in the last four years. Say what you want about his size and the concern for his future health but Prince plays and plays hard everyday. The Giants have said that Tim Lincecum will be one of their Big Three starters in the playoffs. This seems remarkable. No one loves Timmy more than me. His hair, his cockiness, his extra long stride in his pitching motion, but the numbers are clear whatever has been wrong with Lincecum is still wrong with him. Barry Zito has been very strong in the second half of the year and while that in itself might seem like a remarkable statement it seems like a stretch to start Tim over Zito in this case. I might well be wrong but those 28 homeruns that B J Upton has hit this year, a remarkable number when one considers the time lost to injury, should have a flashing Danger sign posted next to them. This would hopefully alert suitors to the unliklihood of these numbers being duplicated once he has signed a long term free agent deal this winter. While it is possible he has finally put it altogether as a Red Sox fan who remembers the 5 homeruns hit in a playoff series against us in 2008 it seems the future never comes for BJ Upton. He is going to get very wealthy and disapoint someone very badly. On opening day in Japan Yoenis Cespedes hit a homerun for the A's but despite his huge power numbers the general consensus was that he had a huge swing with huge holes in it that major league pitchers would use to negate his talents. While Cespedes has struck out a great deal this year his numbers have shown that this is a potential superstar. Raw power, full out effort, and from everything I have read a fantastic wanting to learn attitude mean that the Athletics might well have stolen this player with their free agent signing. How meaningless has the RBI become in baseball circles these days and are those new school thinkers right. I am afraid they are. Case in point, Hunter Pence, who by all accounts has had an off year has 104 Runs Batted In.

Tori Hunter's Resurgence

Years ago I remember Tori Hunter getting his spikes caught on the wall in the triangle in center field at Fenway and hurting himself badly. For the last five years he has been a fixture in California with the Angels. As a pending free agent one always has to wonder if Hunter is suffering from contract year syndrome, but there is nothing in the history or apparent makeup of Tori Hunter that should make one think this is the case. Today Tori had 4 more hits and if one looks at his numbers in the second half of the season one can be nothing but impressed. Of course, it is true, that Hunter has been batting in the rocking chair between Mike Trout and Albert Pujols but many players hit in prime spots in the batting order and you still have to deliver. Hunter has delivered over and over. One could easily see a three year 24 million dollar deal in Tori's future this winter. Certainly more than he expected as the season started.

Buck Showalter and the Orioles

As we go into the last three games of the season the Yankees and Orioles are tied for first place in the American League East. It is, even for the most optimistic baseball fans, something no one could have predicted. The Orioles have had some great seasons. Adam Jones led the team for much of the year. Chris Davis who has been on fire this last week has proved that Texas maybe gave up on him little too early with a thirty homerun season and Jim Johnson, who?, Jim Johnson today earned his fiftieth save. The O's have been managed by Buck Showalter in what might be the best example of how much a manager can affect the success of his team. Think about this, the Orioles have one pitcher, just one pitcher, that has started more than twenty games this season. I, in my experience, have never seen a team built like this and have this success. The Orioles have won some unlikely number of extra inning games in a row. This is a team that is fearless. Contrast that to the Yankees. First anyone who says that the Yankees have choked is wrong. Yes the Yankees had a big lead in July, and no one expected this race to get this close, but the Yankees have had their own injury troubles. Even though Mariano Rivera has been ably replaced by Rafael Soriano the bullpen was significantly shortened by his loss. The Yankees are old. Derek Jeter has been immense but injuries and a significant drop-off in performance when playing by Mark Teixera and Alex Rodriguez have slowed the team. Curtis Granderson has also shown that you can hit forty homeruns and still be one of the most overrated players around and CC Sabathia who by pitching through injury without complaint has shown just what, pardon the pun, a great deal of guts he has. No, this team has not choked, I think that it is clear that Joe Girardi is not the best manager in baseball, I think it is possible that he cannot affect a group of professionals to the extent that Buck Showalter can affect his team of cast offs, rookies and misfits, but he will in the end absorb much of the blame should the Yankees falter. With the exception of my friends who are Yankee fans, and perhaps even they will admit after season end a grudging admiration, one cannot but be excited and happy for the resurgence of success in Baltimore. Baltimore, a town that when we were growing up was a baseball powerhouse. Earl Weaver, Ken Singleton, Cal Ripken, Eddie Murray, and all that pitching, the Orioles were baseball royalty and a welcome sight is seeing them succeed. Go O's, finish the dream.