{"id":691,"date":"2008-09-28T11:17:34","date_gmt":"2008-09-28T10:17:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=691"},"modified":"2009-09-26T12:12:20","modified_gmt":"2009-09-26T11:12:20","slug":"weekly-hit-ground-ball-2008-week-twenty-six","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=691","title":{"rendered":"‘Weekly’ Hit Ground Ball 2008 – Week Twenty Six"},"content":{"rendered":"

All the fun of the ‘fair’<\/strong><\/p>\n

Baseball fans have enjoyed a compelling play-off race during the final week of the regular season, one in which two postseason places are still to be decided heading into the final day (and it might not even be<\/em> the final day).\u00c2\u00a0 But for some people it hasn’t been worth watching.\u00c2\u00a0 The Yankees’ Hank Steinbrenner has tried to dampen the excitement by railing against the current divisional structure.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Like a five-year old who has been told he can’t stay up late and watch TV, Steinbrenner has been jumping up and down and screaming \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Hank has taken objection<\/a> to the fact that a team in the AL East can miss out on the play-offs even when they have won more games than a team in the NL West (for example, a team led by the Yankees’ former manager).\u00c2\u00a0 Steinbrenner wrote: “The biggest problem is the divisional setup in Major League Baseball … I didn’t like it in the 1970s, and I hate it now. Baseball went to a multi-division setup to create more races, rivalries and excitement. But it isn’t fair\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/p>\n

There’s an obvious rebuttal to this comment: no doubt Steinbrenner thought the system was fair when the Yankees were winning rings.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

Let’s go back to the year 2000: the last time the Yankees won a World Series.\u00c2\u00a0 The Bronx Bombers captured the AL East crown with just eighty-seven wins that year, three wins less than the total managed by the Cleveland Indians, who finished second in the Central and missed out on the wildcard by one game to the Mariners.\u00c2\u00a0 In the National League, the divisions were won by teams amassing ninety-five\u00c2\u00a0 wins (Braves and the Cardinals) and ninety-seven wins (the Giants) respectively.\u00c2\u00a0 The Yankees didn’t have to face any of the NL division winners in the World Series, instead they took on the Mets in an all New York Fall Classic.\u00c2\u00a0 The Mets qualified for the postseason via the NL wild card, but they still won seven more regular season games than the Yankees.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

So no doubt Hank wasn’t really celebrating when Mike Piazza flied out to Bernie Williams to end Game Five and to secure a 4-1 series victory.\u00c2\u00a0 When everyone else is proudly boasting about the Yankees’ twenty-six World Championships, Hank politely reminds them all of the unfairness of the divisional system and puts an asterisk against the year 2000 win.<\/p>\n

Or maybe not.\u00c2\u00a0 If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then \u00e2\u20ac\u0153fairness\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is often in the eye of the backside.<\/p>\n

Steinbrenner would probably argue that the NL teams were able to take advantage of weaker opponents (most notably the Phillies, Cubs, Expos and Pirates) to inflate their win totals.\u00c2\u00a0 There may be some truth in that, but if you accept the argument then you can’t simply compare teams based on the number of wins.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Yet Steinbrenner does exactly that: “What if the Yankees finish the season with more wins than the Dodgers, but the Dodgers make the playoffs? Does that make the Dodgers a better team? No\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.\u00c2\u00a0 Make no mistake, if the Dodgers had won ninety-five games this season, Steinbrenner would have still found reason to belittle the achievement (i.e. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153they were beating weaker teams than the Yankees had to face\u00e2\u20ac\u009d).\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

MLB uses an unbalanced schedule, which makes comparing teams from different leagues and divisions a less-than exact science.\u00c2\u00a0 Unless the leagues and divisions were scrapped completely, and all thirty teams played each other the same amount of times, that’s always going to be the case.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 You would only have a completely \u00e2\u20ac\u0153fair\u00e2\u20ac\u009d result if you then didn’t go to a play-off scenario and just awarded the championship to the top team, a prospect nobody in baseball would be in favour of.<\/p>\n

Steinbrenner’s latest comments should be put into context.\u00c2\u00a0 The Yankees have missed out on the postseason for the first time in thirteen years, despite having a payroll nearly five times larger than the team that has beat them to the AL East division title.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s eight years since they last won a World Series: a lifetime for a team that expects to win it every year.\u00c2\u00a0 Their former manager, who walked away from a badly-handled contract offer during the offseason, is heading to October with his new team.\u00c2\u00a0 Add in the fact that Hank and his brother Hal are trying to stamp their mark on a franchise dominated by their father for many years and it’s not difficult to see why he might be a bit touchy at the moment.<\/p>\n

His comments aren’t completely without merit either: many neutrals would agree that the Yankees are a better team than the Dodgers.\u00c2\u00a0 The problem is, there really isn’t a perfect system out there.\u00c2\u00a0 Steinbrenner stated that the move to divisional play was designed \u00e2\u20ac\u0153to create more races, rivalries and excitement\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and in this respect the change has worked.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s enough reason to keep the status quo, regardless of whether it allows people to claim the system is unfair when they fail to achieve what is expected of them.<\/p>\n

Week 26 wrap-up<\/strong><\/p>\n

When you head into the final day of the season not knowing whether it will be the final day of the season, you know it’s going to be exciting.\u00c2\u00a0 The Mets and the Brewers have identical records (89-72) and would need to be separated for the NL wildcard by a tie-breaker scheduled for Monday if they both get the same result today.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

The American League Central is even more complex.\u00c2\u00a0 The Twins have a half-game advantage heading into the final day of the regular season, but the White Sox have played one game less.\u00c2\u00a0 If the Twins win and the White Sox lose, the contest is over.\u00c2\u00a0 Any other combination of results will lead to at least one extra game (the White Sox making up their postponed game against the Tigers on Monday).<\/p>\n

The other six spots are already settled.\u00c2\u00a0 The Phillies (91-70) tied up the NL East last night, joining the Cubs (97-63) and the Dodgers (84-77) in the post-season.\u00c2\u00a0 The Rays (96-65) clinched their first ever division title, ensuring that the Red Sox (94-66) will take on the Angels (99-62) in the ALDS.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

All the fun of the ‘fair’ Baseball fans have enjoyed a compelling play-off race during the final week of the regular season, one in which two postseason places are still to be decided heading into the final day (and it might not even be the final day).\u00c2\u00a0 But for some people it hasn’t been worth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[553],"class_list":["post-691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-hit-ground-ball","tag-mlb-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=691"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4721,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691\/revisions\/4721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}