Baseball Stew: Dumping the Wild Card
Call me old fashioned or over the hill if you like, but I consider myself to be a baseball traditionalist and that means, no surprise here, that I hate the wild card concept. I want each league’s top team, the ones who slugged it out over the long haul of baseball’s beautifully grueling schedule and who survived, as the fittest should, to play for the title of world champs.
That wasn’t the case, for instance, this year. Of the 10 clubs which made it to postseason play, the San Francisco Giants win total of 88 was the lowest (tied with two other wild card teams) and Kansas City was only one win better. That means two of the four clubs with the worst records of teams eligible for the playoffs made it to the World Series. Two wild card team vying for the championship is a purist’s worst scenario.
The Series, in fact, marked the first time in a full season in which both teams in the World Series won fewer than 90 games, and it was the second time both teams were wild card winners—the other time was in 2002 when the Angels beat the Giants. With the Giants win, they became the sixth wild card team to be declared world champions.
Due to two wild cards now advancing to postseason play, another strange thing occurred. Before revealing that, think back to the days when the two teams who truly had records to be proud of made it to the World Series. Consider the excellence of, say, the Baltimore Orioles from 1969-1971 when they made it to the Fall Classic three years running. In 1969 they had two 20-game winners in Mike Cuellar, 23-11, and Dave McNally at 20-7. Only the Miracle Mets kept them from winning the title. Toss in a young Jim Palmer and his splendid 16-4 record, too. The next season the O’s won it all with three 20-game winners. In 1971 it took Roberto Clemente and the Pittsburgh Pirates seven games to stop the Orioles who had, count them, an incredible four 20-game winners, a true rarity. Cuellar was 20-9, Pat Dobson posted a 20-8 record, Palmer went 20-9, and McNally had a slate of 21-5!
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Now, contrast those pitching feats of an amazing team, a true winner, with the stats of the 2014 Giants. Three of their starters had records of four or more wins below the .500 mark. That was a World Series first, and an embarrassing one at that. San Francisco had pitchers at four, five, and six games under .500 in Tim Hudson (9-13), Ryan Vogelsong (8-13), and Jake Peavy (7-13 overall on the year). Wild card teams deserve to be in the World Series? Hah!
In Part Two of this two-part story we dig deeper and disclose some other humiliating facts that have come about due to the dilution of what baseball deems to be the type of talent which is sufficient to make it to the playoffs. For example, as difficult as it may seem to believe, there was once a team which wasn’t much better than a .500 club which won the World Series— and this didn’t take place very long ago, either.