Four on the Doorstep: A Baltimore Guide to the Championship Round

The media executives, one imagines, are of mixed feelings.

On the one hand, Toronto and Kansas City in the American League Championship Series is traditionally underwhelming, from a ratings perspective. They didn’t want both Texas teams to make it — after all, an all-Texas ALCS means no one on either coast has a guaranteed, built-in rooting interest — but the Blue Jays and Royals have the same problem. Then again, over 8 million Canadians tuned in to watch the final game of the Jays/Rangers series, and there is very little Canada likes more than a team of theirs playing an “American” sport and sticking it to the Americans. And while the Royals are not a big-market team, they should get a local interest bump from the Cardinals being eliminated, and they’re also the seasoned veterans of this particular postseason run — they were one game away from winning the World Series last year. Add to that the fierce series that Kansas City and Toronto played earlier this year (one that everyone hoped would be continued in the postseason) and the ALCS should have enough storyline and fundamental draw power to get viewers engaged even without a coastal powerhouse like the Yankees.

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And besides, if you want big fanbases hanging on every pitch, there’s the Mets and the Cubs in the National League Championship Series. The Cubs need no real introduction — our mass media’s given everyone more than they can handle of the loveable losers who just can’t seal the deal, goats, Bartman, curses, the works. Having lucked into a super-ace courtesy of the Baltimore Orioles and assembled a cast of young hitters that are motoring in the postseason, they’re probably the favorites to win the National League. The Mets, however, have an arguably deeper rotation of elite young pitching, and while they don’t have the pedigree at the plate that the Cubs have, their core of hitters built around slugging 1B Lucas Duda, deadline pickup Yoenis Cespedes, NLDS hero Daniel Murphy and young phenom Travis d’Arnaud can match Chicago blow for blow in a seven-game series.

The real question, of course, is who to root for. Given that this is an Orioles site, we’ll look at that with a Baltimore fan’s slant in mind.

Toronto Blue Jays

One imagines the Toronto Blue Jays are right out. They’re a divisional rival of Baltimore, a number of their marquee players — Josh Donaldson and Jose Bautista especially — have been involved in drama with the Orioles, and a World Series win for Toronto could lead to an expanded budget for the Jays next year and more permissiveness in free agency, which could in turn lead to Toronto becoming a very attractive destination for Chris Davis at a time when the Orioles very much need his market to stay small in order to re-sign him.

And that’s fair enough, as far as it goes. However, from a purely aesthetic point of view: it’s hard to deny that the Jays are the most fun team to watch this postseason. The combination of fan engagement in Toronto (good and bad) and a team geared entirely towards putting up runs in bunches makes for amazingly engaging baseball. This is especially true if you’ve got no investment in them as a fan yourself: you don’t have to feel embarrassed when they’re almost forced to forfeit an elimination game because fans won’t stop throwing trash on the field.

Sure, they’re in the playoffs at least partially at the Orioles’ expense, and sure, them winning it all could mean the Orioles have problems this offseason they might otherwise not have. But those problems are mainly the Orioles’ own doing, and Toronto plays fun baseball.

Kansas City Royals

And frankly, the Toronto Blue Jays haven’t inflicted half the direct pain on the Baltimore fanbase that the Royals did when they swept them out of the ALCS last year. You couldn’t even feel good about losing to a superior team; at time it felt like wizards were out there directing bloops and seeing-eye grounders, causing defensive mishaps, and otherwise humiliating a team that came into the series looking like a strong contender for the World Series.

The Royals aren’t precisely the same team they were last year in personnel, but they’re fairly close. Their team identity is different, though: Mike Moustakas and Eric Hosmer have finally become the absolutely legit corner infielders they played like in last year’s ALCS, while the team’s rotation (though bolstered by a talented ace in Johnny Cueto) has taken some steps backward.

The bullpen is still legit, however; if the Royals get a lead, they’re generally able to smother their opponents’ offense in the late innings with the same terrifying consistency that they did last year. The good news for Toronto fans is that the Jays aren’t just any offense, and the late game battles between the Toronto hitters and the Royals’ relievers are probably the biggest matchup in the series.

My pick: Toronto

Chicago Cubs

This series is a tale of two clubs in whom the Orioles can see themselves, in very different ways. With the Cubs, it’s obvious: there are a number of former Orioles on the Cubs roster helping them win games in the postseason. There’s Jason Hammel, who the O’s let walk after the 2013 season and has been an excellent contributor for Chicago, both as a starter and a trading chip. There’s Pedro Strop, an erstwhile reliever who was dealt to the Cubs after a horrific start to the 2013 season and has refound his groove in the National League.

And then there’s Jake Arrieta.

Arrieta hardly needs introduction or even recap at this point, but while Orioles fans can hardly begrudge him his success — after all, it’s quite clearly the Orioles themselves who are to blame for his lack of development in Baltimore — that doesn’t mean they can’t root against him. And while the Cubs have been an effectively run team, they’re also exemplars of the worst impulses of baseball’s modern front offices: they play brazen service time games with their players to delay free agency, they tanked to maximize payroll efficiency with young players while crying poverty to their fans, preaching that three years of bad (but profitable) baseball was necessary for their team to turn around, and they play the media like a fiddle — which is usually just annoying, but not when it comes to the curious case a few years back of Jorge Soler going after someone with a bat in a minor league dugout, which Team President Theo Epstein excused by saying that someone had made a remark about Soler’s family, and that anyway, he didn’t really swing the bat, and therefore it wasn’t a violent action. As patently ridiculous as that explanation was (and remains), everyone more or less just nodded their heads in agreement, and Soler walked away with a mere five-game suspension.

Also, Cubs fans might be the most obnoxious people, as a group, in all of sports. You can root for them to feel good, but you rooted for Red Sox fans to feel good in 2004 — and look at the whirlwind you reaped there.

New York Mets

The Mets, on the other hand, remind one of Baltimore not in their roster, but in their ownership. The major difference between Peter Angelos and Fred Wilpon is that Angelos at least got rich helping people hold corporate America accountable for wrongdoing. The Wilpons are real estate leeches and ponzi scheme enablers. In practice, their oversight has led to the same thing: interference in baseball operations from the highest levels, chafing budgetary restrictions, and long periods of misery interrupted by brief moments of dashed hope.

And in the Mets, Orioles fans might see their salvation: a canny, veteran executive in Sandy Alderson who was able to work within the confines and annoyances of his ownership group to build a contender on about a $100 million budget — more or less in the same spending range as the Orioles. The major difference, of course, is that the Mets can develop pitching while the Orioles can’t, but it’s at least good to see proof that a team with mid-level spending and intrusive ownership can put together a talented young squad mainly through smart signings and good player development.

It’s always fun to see the Mets go farther in the postseason than the Yankees, too, though Yankees fans at this point more pity the Mets than anything else (and are probably already on this bandwagon for civic pride reasons). If anyone’s going to outduel Arrieta in this postseason, it’s going to be someone on the Mets roster — either Matt Harvey or, most likely, Noah Syndergaard.

Plus, the Mets wear orange. That’s kind of like the Orioles.

My pick: New York

Obviously, you do you. If you want to root for the Cubs because ending long losing streaks is cool? Go right ahead. Feel better about the Royals than the Jays? Weird, but perfectly acceptable. We’re in the late and dangerous days of the postseason now, and there’s no point picking allegiances based on “better” or “worse.” By the time this postseason is over, at least one 20 year drought will have ended. Enjoy yourself while it lasts. Maybe next year, it’ll be Baltimore’s turn.