The Dodgers? Seriously?
Yes, Evans, seriously. What we have all witnessed over the last week is not one of the most anticlimactic events in the history of sports. True, the 97-game-winning Chicago Cubs -- "a legitimate threat to win the franchise's first World Series in exactly 100 years," as Mr. Clinchy put it -- did fall flat on their faces. And it was against the Dodgers, winners of 84 games.
But really, is it that surprising? Is it that anticlimactic?
Sports are arbitrary, playoffs are arbitrary, and baseball in particular is arbitrary. Imagine having a job in which your only goal was to accomplish one thing: say, attracting a wealthy client named "Johnson" and signing him to some type of deal (let's call it the "Johnson Deal").
You barely sleep for six months, preparing presentations, graphing inhuman amounts of data, becoming an expert on flow charts and scatter plots -- all in an attempt to woo Johnson and land the deal. Then, let's say you have a few bad days at work. Actually, I won't even take it that far; let's say you simply develop a cold, and for three days your work is slightly sub-par as a result.
In that brief time, Johnson goes ahead and signs with another firm, while you suddenly feel a draft down your backside.
This is what baseball is actually like. Six months of labor can be wiped out by three sub-par days at the office.
Take the 2001 Mariners for example. The team featured eight All-Stars, including four starters. Ichiro was the AL batting champion, Rookie of the Year and MVP. They had the best regular season in baseball history, compiling an absurd 116-46 record. Then, all that was taken away, made insignificant, when the Mariners fell to the Yankees 4-1 in the ALCS. In an instant, they lost the Johnson Deal.
Wasn't that a little more anticlimactic than the Cubs losing to the Dodgers? And yet, was the story of the 2001 playoffs "flushed down the toilet" when that happened? No, it wasn't. In fact, the Yankees and Diamondbacks went on to play one of the greatest World Series in the history of baseball.
Baseball is not a fairy tale. The media can make it seem like a team was destined to win all along -- like it was fate -- but that's just not the case.
If it were, the Mariners would have found a way to win in the 2001 playoffs and go down as the best team in baseball history. If it were, the Yankees would have found a way to emerge victorious from Game 7 of the World Series and win a championship in the year that New York needed it most.
But sports are not strictly dictated by reason.
Back in 2006, the Cardinals were winners of 83 regular-season contests. They only barely managed to win the division, trumping the late-surging Astros by one game. There were five teams in baseball that year that won more than 83 regular season games and did not make the playoffs! Indeed, the Cardinals had the third-worst record of any playoff team in baseball history. Yet somehow, they managed to get past the Padres (88 regular-season wins), the Mets (97) and the Tigers (95). It didn't lack drama, either; Adam Wainwright dropping in a two-out, 0-2 curveball to strike out Carlos Beltran looking with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth of Game 7 of the NLCS literally could not be any more dramatic.
So what if the team that deserves to win is not the team that does? That's life: If you can't close the deal, you can't be the best. It's simply something that every sports fan must accept, unless we want to go back to an age without a World Series or playoff system, in which each league has its own pennant awarded to the top regular-season finisher. Now that would be anticlimactic.
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Dave Heck is a junior majoring in philosophy. He can be reached at David.Heck@tufts.edu.
