It was not my idea to be out of the country during the final weeks of one of the most bizarre and unlikely post-season races in recent years. It was the idea of my granddaughter, who in collaboration with her fiancé decided to get married this week.
I don’t blame Elital. She doesn’t know the difference between the Blue Jays and the Red Sox and even if she did she wouldn’t let them get in the way of her wedding. Yes, there are more important things in life than baseball. At the same time, though, she also wouldn’t let her personal happiness detract from the crazy things happening in Major League Baseball.
Some aspects of the races have remained stable. It’s very safe, for example, to say that the Cubs will win the National League Central title and finish with the best record in the majors. Their regular-season record, on the other hand, will have no effect on their fans’ goal, which is to deliver a World Series championship to Chicago’s North Side for the first time since 1908. The record, however, demonstrates how good the Cubs are, and they have been very good.
The Nationals are in good position to join the Cubs in the N.L. playoffs as East Division winners, but it is probably a bit premature to round out that field with the Dodgers as the West winners. The Giants dominated the division up to the All-Star break but have faltered badly since then. They could still stage a revival and overtake the Dodgers, but they haven’t played like they mean it.
The Giants have also jeopardized their backup route to the post-season, where they have prevailed in each of the previous three even-numbered years.
Even while they were tumbling behind the Dodgers in the division standings, the Giants held a comfortable wild-card lead, but suddenly that advantage has evaporated as well. Entering Sunday’s games the Giants had the league’s best second-place record but were a mere half a game ahead of the Mets and a game in front of the Cardinals.
Why or how the Mets are competing in the post-season race is a mystery. Starting the season with the best corps of starting pitchers in the majors, the Mets have stood helpless by watching them drop one by one, either to injury or ineffectiveness.
The Mets, along with the Nationals with Stephen Strasburg, have epitomized a team that doesn’t have a clue about dealing with the physical perils of young pitchers.
Teams like the Mets and the Nationals go out of their way to protect the arms of their young pitchers, but they get hurt anyway. Baseball today knows only one way of handling young pitchers, and that’s to pamper them. When the pitchers hurt their arm despite the pampering, their teams pamper them some more.
I grew up in an era where pitchers started every fourth day, not every fifth day as they do today, and sometimes they even finished what they started, that is, they pitched complete games and weren’t limited to 100 pitches and weren’t removed after seven innings with a perfect game, as Rich Hill of the Dodgers was Saturday when he had thrown 89 pitches.
Managers and their teams are obsessed with pitch limits and inning limits, and they still haven’t found a cure for the common cold or elbow injuries. That’s the thing that mystifies me. They keep imposing these limits to avoid injuries, but the pitchers continue to get hurt so they continue to impose limits.
Old-timers suggest two things they did in their time: throw more, not less, and run. Throwing, not pitching, every day would strengthen their arms, and running would strengthen their legs and take pressure off their arms.
No one wants to tell pitchers to run more for fear of offending them, and no one wants to tell pitchers to throw more for fear of getting them hurt. The result: pitchers keep getting hurt.
But I digress. I was talking about playoff races. If the Mets have surprised by getting into the National League race, the Yankees have shocked by doing that in the American League. The Yankees have not only pushed themselves into the wild-card competition, but they also have made their presence felt in the division race.
For weeks, if not months, the word on the Yankees was there were too many teams ahead of them that they would have to leapfrog to gain a post-season spot. At one time there were two teams in front of them in each division – a total of six teams they would have to climb over to secure a wild-card spot.
The Yankees even traded Carlos Beltran, Aroldis Chapman and Andrew Miller, accumulating prospects for future use, thinking their contending season was over. But the Yankees, whether fueled by the awakened remaining veterans or the new kids, began winning and have continued winning while some of those wild-card competitors slipped.
At the start of play Sunday, the Blue Jays held the first wild card, and the Orioles the second a game behind the Blue Jays. Having leapfrogged the Royals, the Astros and the Mariners with a 7-game winning streak and 15 wins in 21 games, the Yankees were tied with the Tigers a game behind the Orioles.
With three weeks to go, two A. L. divisions seem to belong to the Indians and the Rangers. The A.L. wild cards, though, are in a contest that includes six or seven teams. That the Yankees are one of them makes no sense.
Those last three weeks won’t be as personally satisfying as my granddaughter’s wedding, but they will give me something to follow from afar.