The Regular Season Champion

21 Tuesday Oct 2014

Tags

The 2001 Seattle Mariners may be the best baseball team of my lifetime. Led by Ichiro Suzuki – a veteran from Japan in his MLB rookie year – Edgar Martinez and Bret Boone, they won a record 116 games. But they are a footnote in baseball history because they didn’t win the World Series. They fell in the American League Championship Series, four games to two, to the New York Yankees. (That Yankees team, at the tail end of their dynasty years, eventually lost to Arizona in a dramatic seventh game of the World Series.)

The 2007 New England Patriots may be the best football team of my lifetime. They were the first team ever to go 16-0 in the regular season, but because they lost to the Giants – a 10-6 Wild Card team – in the Super Bowl they’re mostly remembered as team that couldn’t seal the deal.

This year’s World Series will be contested between two Wild Card teams not good enough to win one of their league’s three divisions. The San Francisco finished 88-74, tied for the fourth best record in the National League. The Kansas City Royals, at 89-73, were also fourth in the AL, and nine games back of the Angels. Since 2000, just three World Series champions had the best record in baseball.

In American sports, the championship is the point. We don’t much care how you got there. With the advent of multiple rounds of playoffs, and the introduction of wild card teams, the regular season is now just an extended throat clearing before the main event. It’s only purpose – outside of selling tickets, of course – is to establish seedings for all-important post season tournament. And the seedings rarely matter.

It’s particularly problematic in baseball. Post-season football is pretty much like regular season football – teams play once a week, the same strategies apply – but post-season baseball is a different sport. Teams built to play 162 games now have to win one game at a time. The regular season rewards organizational depth, 5-man rotations and harboring resources. Savvy managers will throw an inferior pitcher to rest a better one, sacrificing one game now to win two or three later. In the post season, pitchers throw with short rest, rotations shrink to three and there’s no value in saving your reliever for tomorrow when there might not be a tomorrow.

Imagine taking the first 10 finishers in the Olympic marathon and having them run a 400 meter sprint. The winner gets the gold medal.

My solution: Give a trophy to the regular season champion.

I’m not suggesting getting rid of the post season. I’m saying let’s acknowledge the accomplishment of finishing the season with the best record. Let’s reward excellence.

Giving out two trophies in a season might seem unorthodox, but that’s standard practice in international soccer. Teams in the English Premier League compete for multiple championships over the course of the season: along with the regular season winner, there’s the Football Association tournament and the League Cup. The best teams also compete in European-wide tournaments. Teams talk about winning multiple trophies, or silverware, and the best teams boast of wining the treble – three trophies in one season (last done by Manchester United in 1998-99).

This will not be an easy adjustment for U.S. sports fans. The National Hockey League gives the President’s Cup to the team with the best record. It you haven’t heard of it, you’re not alone. (It probably doesn’t help that the Stanley Cup is the most iconic trophy in North American sports).

Another obstacle: Unlike European sports, Americans leagues are broken up into leagues and divisions. You could hand out trophies for the best record in each league (or football conference) but I’d rather not. One trophy for the best record. Ties are broken by run (or point) differential.

So congratulations, you 2002 Oakland A’s, winners of 103 Moneyball games! Your efforts are rewarded. Well done, 2004 St. Louis Cardinals (105) and 1998 Atlanta Braves (106). The 1954 Cleveland Indians, winners of an astonishing 111 games in an 154-games season, finally get their championship banner. The 2009 and 1998 Yankees are double winners (and unfortunately, so are the 2013 and 2007 Red Sox).

And take a bow, 2001 Mariners. The best regular season of all time deserves a trophy.

Why I’m not tired of Derek Jeter

27 Saturday Sep 2014

Posted by percivalhenry in Sports

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

baseball, sports

After a year-long farewell tour, capped by an over-the-top final appearence in New York Thursday, the backlash to the Derek Jeter tribute threatens to overtake the celebration itself. It’s too much, too extravagent for a player whose career numbers are more Biggio more than DiMaggio. (Keith Olbermann sums up this sentiment in blistering fashion here.)

I get that. The Yankees aren’t good at restraint, events in New York tend to get magnified and the whole thing has gotten sort of tacky. If I wasn’t a Yankees fan, I’m sure I would be annoyed.

But I am a Yankees fan. And here’s why I’m not sick of it.

While I vaguely remember the glory years of the late 1970s (and the first game I went to featured a Thurmon Munson home run), I date my fandom from the 1986 season. The Yankees were OK, but that was the year the Mets of Gooden, Strawberry and Carter took over New York. That team was brash and obnoxious, its fans even more so, and the contrarian in me decided to make the Yankees my team.

My timing was not good. The Yankees were at the start of a steep decline. This was the era of Hurricane George, of Howard Spira, of Dallas Green. In these years, the Yankees traded Jay Buhner (career home runs: 310, 3 with the Yankees) for Ken Phelps (career home runs 123, 17 with the Yanks). The once-great Don Mattingly was hobbled with a bad back. Our big free agent signings were Jack Clark and Danny Tartabull. We tried to get excited about rookies like Kevin Maas.

These were the Yankees’ starting shortstops and their batting averages from 1986 to 1995, the year before Jeter became the full time starter:

1986: Bob Meacham .224
1987: Wayne Tolleson .221
1988: Rafael Santana .240
1989: Alvaro Espinoza .282
1990: Espinoza .224
1991: Espinoza .256
1992: Andy Stankwiecz .268
1993: Spike Owen .234
1994 Mike Gallego .289
1995: Tony Fernandez .245

(I know BA is an old-fashioned stat but trust me, their WAR wasn’t very impressive, either. Fernandez was a very good player at the end of his career. Tolleson and Gallego were capable utility infielders unfairly elevated to starting positions. The rest sucked).

The team’s performance was similarly dismal. They had four straight losing seasons from 1989-1993 (for the first time since 1912-15) and lost a record 95 games in 1990. Even worse, the front office seemed to have no clue about what to do. They signed washed-up free agents, traded away prospects and ran through a string of miserable managers. It was horrible to watch.

And these were the Yankees. When I signed up, I thought I was getting the team of Ruth and Gehrig, Ford and Mantle. A team with rich history, with a tradition of winning and winning a lot. The team I got was a sad shell of that, trading on nostalgia and faded glory, bumbling on the field and off.

But gradually, things began to change. George Steinbrenner was banned from the team and when he was reinstated, he stopped meddling. Front office decisions improved. Young talent was identified and groomed. Roberto Kelly was traded for Paul O’Neil. Buck Showalter took over as manager and raised expectations. And into this new, hopeful environment came Derek Jeter.

Jeter wasn’t responsbile for this transformation, but he represented it more than any other player. He was young, talented and more than anything, professional. He acted like a winner, and he played the way we expect of Yankees. He led them to four championships in five years (and tacked on a fifth a decade later). He was the heir to Mantle, Munson and Mattingly. He was, after the Steve Balbonis and Mel Halls, a Yankee that Yankee fans could be proud of.

In the long sweep of Yankees history, the four years of darkness from 1989-1993 is a footnote, the momentary decline that set the stage for the great years that followed. For me, though, they were long and painful. Jeter may not be the greatest Yankee of all time. But he was the right Yankee at the right time. And for that I am grateful.

Ranking Sports: Some observations

15 Thursday May 2014

Posted by percivalhenry in Ranking Sports, Sports

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

baseball, rankings

So that was interesting.

My post ranking major league baseball team names got almost 2,000 visitors yesterday, thanks to a link on the very cool Uni Watch blog here. That’s by far the biggest single day in this little blog’s brief history, and I’m thrilled that so many people took the time to check it out. My post also got about 25 comments and most of them were not, ahem, very complimentary. That’s cool, too. The fact that people took the time to compose (mostly) polite and reasoned responses means they were engaged, and that’s all I can ask for. If the comments were critical, well, if you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen …

When you write about something as deeply felt as sports (or art history, for that matter), it’s going to rile people up, and if you’re going to rank teams – for whatever reason – it’s going to piss people off. Fans of every team – save, I guess, the Orioles – feel I didn’t properly appreciate their team name, and should rank it higher. But in ranking 30 teams, some are going to be ranked highly and others low. So my instinctual response to this grumbling is to just say, `Fine, I screwed up and I’m moving every team up 10 places.’

I did want to make a few more specific points, which I probably didn’t make clear in the post’s introduction.

1, This is an aesthetic, not scientific, exercise. It’s a ranking of the team names in the order I like them. The criteria I listed served to guide my decisions, not to compel them. And I never intended to give all three criteria equal ranking in every case (at one point I considered assigning numerical values to each and adding them up but I rejected that because it felt too rigid). So, for example, in the case of the Diamondbacks, while they meet two of my criteria – it’s a unique name and more-or-less geographically specific- it’s such a blatantly ugly and commercial name, that criteria overwhelmed the others.

2, History counts, but it’s not the determining factor in how I feel about a name. A boring, historical name is still a boring name. So whatever the origins of the names Tigers, Pirates and Giants, they’re still bland, generic names used by other teams in other sports in other cities. Even if the Tigers wore orange socks in 1890, that’s not something specific to Detroit or even baseball. (It should also be noted there’s a lot of debate, even in the comments to my post, over the stories behind some of these names). Lastly, even if the origins of names Tigers and Pirates were non-feline or piratical, it hasn’t kept the teams from cloaking themselves in Tiger and Pirate iconography. If they had a claim to uniqueness, they lost it when they trotted out the trite mascots.

3, I didn’t make racism one of my explicit criteria, but I guess I should have. I don’t like it.

Anyway, thanks again to everyone who checked out the post and stay tuned for my next ranking project: World Cup soccer uniforms. I doubt anyone will have opinions about those.