Lincicome: October baseball used to be perfect. Now it's just phony
Needlessly and reliably, greed and gimmicks have given us another baseball season, already reduced without objection, although poor Milwaukee did seem to deserve better.
As for Chicago, hiding once again behind their hats, the Cubs and Sox wasted honest affection, not to mention much money, and sorry about that but tradition can, at least, be admired.
On purpose baseball is now just another end-loaded hustle, concocted not conducted, a lottery ticket, a wrist full of watches. May the best mark win.
Baseball has gone to much trouble to phony up October, yet I feel no obligation to play along.
Is it too much to ask that we forget that at least half of the playoff baseball teams were the raisins and not the bran, the anchovies and not the pizza, the croutons and not the salad? I think not.
The ideal wild card, as we all know, is in the hole with a high pair showing, but baseball has other uses for it. It is to manufacture counterfeit pennant races, and to fill out the beginning of October, once and nevermore the sacred space for the World Series.
Six wild card teams have won the World Series, most recently Washington in 2019, and none of them have apologized. The Red Sox broke their curse as a wild card and the Marlins have done it no other way. Twice.
Which of the eight baseball teams continuing to play is wild and which ones are not is moot, and which won 104 games and which stumbled into October matters not at all.
There may be a special distinction in being in the final mix, but I am not going to compare the presence of Arizona and Minnesota to shooting par from the red tees, finishing first in the overweight division of a marathon, or being good at mixed pickleball. Oh, wait. I just did.
You must have favorites. You can't watch baseball without favorites. That is what is wrong with baseball playoffs and that is what is wrong with baseball in a pile. A pile of strangers. Here they are. Pick one. Baltimore, Minnesota, Houston, Texas, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Arizona, all tugging for the kindness of strangers.
It has been nearly 20 years of baseball imitating football and everybody but me seems just fine with it. Four levels of playoffs clutter the focus, straining for distinction, needing brackets, just like basketball and even hockey, with the beards already grown.
I don't need more preliminaries. I've had April to October preliminaries. I don't need second thoughts. I don't need another opinion.
The numbers worked out just fine for me. The Braves are the best in the National League. The Orioles the best in the American League, or what's a season for?
This was baseball through the spring and the summer and the fall, a whole existence, self-contained and complete. Except for those stupid divisions, another bit of pie-slicing that dilutes the taste of the thing.
Do we wrestle for the remote to see the Dodgers and Diamondbacks again? The Braves and the Phillies? They already sorted themselves out in what used to be admired as "the standings."
The Astros and the Rangers played out their rivalry all the way to the final day and for what? So they may get the chance to do it all over again.
And what of the poor, perennial Yankees, breaking hard hearts for a change? Any season that ends with the Yankees seeking sympathy deserves its own smirk and a back pat.
Gone without a struggle already are Tampa and Toronto and Miami and Milwaukee, happiness replaced by a blur of deletion. Of the eight teams left, six of them will soon be taking a seat in the same cart.
You see, everything we've dropped in on and out of all baseball season is now meaningless. And we are expected to be excited to find out if the Braves deserved to win 104 games and the Orioles 101.
Because if it is not the Braves and the O's at the end, then the awful possibility could very well be Minnesota and Arizona, either one of whom would not be Cinderella but a fluke.