The Milwaukee Brewers are four wins away from the first World Series title in franchise history. Given that they're the superior team in their matchup with the Tampa Bay Rays and much more rested, the expectation in most quarters is that they'll get those four wins. That alone is special enough – the whole point, you would agree.
The Brewers, though, are also four wins away from joining an even more exclusive cohort of World Series champions: those teams that not only won the World Series but did so after dominating the regular season. Especially in this ongoing era of playoff bloat, Major League Baseball more often than not awards the belt and the title to a team that, from April through September, was something less than the best club. That's the nature of the sport when you reduce it to the relatively tiny sample of games found in the postseason, grow the field, and let randomness rule.
It's a sport already built upon a certain level of unpredictability. For instance, the 2017 Dodgers -- en route to winning 104 games and the pennant -- lost 16 of 17 at one point. The 2006 Cardinals eked out 83 wins in the regular season before barging to the championship in October.
The 1988 Mets went 10-1 against the Dodgers in the regular season but then fell to them in seven games in the NLCS. These, of course, are just a handful of the many examples. The upshot of all this is that in MLB, the best team during the regular season doesn't wind up hoisting the trophy as often as it does in the NFL, NBA, and NHL.
The shame of it is that the 162-game regular season, because of its remorseless breadth and everyday-ness, is a true cauldron and, in an ideal world, the sport's defining feature. Forging the most wins across those six months means something, and indeed by any sensible standard it means more than stacking up 11 or 13 wins in October. If horse sense prevailed, then MLB would reward the team with the best regular season with some kind of hardware that reflects the hard-won nature of the achievement.
On this point, please permit the writer to quote the current collective bargaining agreement between players and clubs: "During the term of this Agreement, each Club shall be scheduled to play 162 games during each championship season." Emphasis mine, but I'm willing to share it. Yes, the regular season in officially official terms is known as the "championship season." But, to our grave cultural diminishment, we don't really treat it as such. Instead, it's an exercise in qualification and seeding for October.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
