State Of MLB With A Week To Go

You know how as you get older, time seems to move faster? That’s how I feel this MLB season.

It seems like just yesterday that we started this thing, and now here we are with a week to go, the playoffs approaching and I could’ve sworn we’ve only played about 52 games or so.

Wait, we have? I guess that explains it!

We are certainly living in a bizarre world right now, with sports encompassing just a tiny sliver of all of that. So I guess we should just enjoy what we have and roll with it, and hope that there is something of a return to normalcy in the spring of 2021. We can dream can’t we?

(You can discuss this on the BSL Board here.)

In the meantime, let’s look at some things that are going on as the regular season winds down.

END OF AN ASTROS ERA?

The Houston Astros are not going to catch the Oakland A’s in the AL West, but they’re not yet out of the playoff race. They’re hovering around .500 and they’re not doing anything particularly well, sitting just slightly above league-average in both runs scored and runs allowed. This is a mediocre bunch, and while they could still very well end up qualifying for a spot in these generously-expanded playoffs, they don’t look like much of a threat to advance to the World Series, let alone win it.

And then comes the news that whatever they do in the coming weeks, they’ll be doing it without Justin Verlander, who after spending most of this late summer trying to work his way back onto the field, has opted for season-ending Tommy John surgery instead. This is not really surprising. What is surprising is that the Astros did nothing to improve their pitching staff at the trade deadline, even after watching Gerrit Cole depart for the Yankees in the offseason, even after watching Verlander take the sideline after Opening Day.

Either way, this might be the last we see of Verlander in an Astros uniform, as he will be a free agent after the 2021 season. And one has to wonder if this will be the end of a checkered era in Houston, an era marked by multiple scandals and a tainted championship that resulted in some executives – yet zero players — being punished.

[Cue Joe Kelly pouty face GIF.]

SOME APPRECIATION FOR TIM ANDERSON

You might not realize this but White Sox shortstop Tim Anderson hit .335 to win the AL battling title last season. This year, he is hitting 30 points higher, slugging over .600 and playing a crucial role in his team’s rise to the top of the AL Central.

It’s not difficult to see the flaws in Anderson’s game. His defense is suspect. He’s allergic to walking. His BABIP is insanely high (.399 in 2019, .415 this year). But he’s doing something right, including hitting for a ton of power, keeping his strikeouts to a reasonable rate and stealing a few bases as well.

On top of all of this, his trash talk game is top-notch. After hitting a 421-foot bomb off Trevor Bauer on Saturday night, Anderson said that Bauer gave him a “cookie” and suggested that the broadcast team tell Bauer to “put that on his YouTube channel.” I am here for this.

SOME APPRECIATION FOR FREDDIE FREEMAN

We’ve talked about the 2020 MLB Awards multiple times on The Warehouse this summer (subscribe and listen!) and when it comes to the NL MVP race, we’ve pretty much focused on two guys, the Padres’ Fernando Tatis Jr. and the Dodgers’ Mookie Betts. And understandably so.

But we’ve been sleeping on another guy who might end up with a better season than both of those players – Atlanta’s Freddie Freeman. Chipper Jones put out a Twitter post on Saturday that makes the case, and I have to admit it’s a good one. Freeman leads both Tatis and Betts in pretty much every stat aside from home runs.

I guess you can ding Freeman for defense if you like, which would be fair. But his offense has been so spectacular – the man has a 184 OPS+, and more walks than strikeouts! – that it might make up for that.

And don’t forget that Freeman is doing all of this after recovering from a rather frightening case of COVID-19 that had him battling a 104.5-degree fever, praying to “please don’t take me.” He hasn’t missed a single regular season game.

A BIGGER POSTSEASON FIELD

One thing MLB fans and media folks love to do is rag on MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred. Actually many players like to rag on him, too. And team officials. And scouts. And umpires. And to be fair, sometimes Manfred’s decisions make it seem like he welcomes a good ragging.

This happened again recently when Manfred spoke of the idea of keeping these expanded playoffs in the future. He didn’t say that it would be the exact same format, and of course Manfred cannot make such a decision unilaterally anyway. But that didn’t stop the pitchforks from coming out.

Many media folks bearing those pitchforks are people I respect and admire. And they make some valid points, too. But the main issues seem to revolve around this idea that expanding the playoffs makes the regular season meaningless. That nobody will care about Dodger games in September when they’ve clinched in August. That it’s bad for baseball to have mediocre teams in the postseason. That this is going to lead to mediocre playoff baseball. That this is going to lead to mediocre teams winning championships.

I have a couple of points to make in response to this.

First of all, to the point that regular season games will be meaningless, I would respond: Meaningless to whom? Because I must say, as a long-time follower of the Mariners, I am something of an expert on meaningless regular season games. Dodger games in September are not meaningless to Dodger fans, but Mariner games in late May often are. Attendance and ratings numbers will back this up. The more teams that are in contention later in the season, the more meaningful games there will be. And that makes things more fun on many levels. It makes the games matter more, not less. It makes the trade deadline more interesting. It draws more eyeballs to games in more places, and isn’t that what you want?

Now I do have a caveat to all of this. I do think that if you’re going to expand permanently like this, you need to incentivize winning your division. You don’t want to see a team win 105 games and then be competing on a level playing field with a .500 team in the first round. To this end I have a couple proposals.

• Every playoff series is best-of-seven. Full stop. I hate best-of-three series. I don’t even really like best-of-fives. Reward the team that has more depth. Would this be too many games? No. There are too many games in spring training. Trim the spring schedule, throw in a few scheduled double-headers and trim a couple games from the regular season schedule to make this happen.
• Division winners host ALL games in the first round. They are doing that this year and I dig it. I’d like to see that in a best-of-seven series.

Lastly, I would like to encourage everyone to lighten up a little bit. There is a lot of bad crap happening right now. The pandemic is still here, the entire Western U.S. is on fire and yadda, yadda, yadda you know all the rest.

The point is that expanding the MLB playoffs is not that big a deal and if done right it could be really cool. Sports is fun. Sports is entertainment. Allow yourself to be entertained.