This illustrates what it is that the Yankee money is buying. It’s hard to buy playoff wins, but it’s a lot easier to buy year after year after year after year after year of playoff appearances, without “rebuilding” years like the rest of the majors have to go through. They can be complete asses with their money, they can and do have bad luck, players can get old and lose effectiveness, and they will still make the playoffs next year and the year after that.
It’ll be nice when we can go back to talking about the actual playoffs and quit talkin’ about the friggin’ Yankees.
I kid, I kid.
Another problem for the Yankees is that Luis Sojo retired a few years ago.
Because they’re IN most postseason series than anyone else.
The Yankees have participated in more playoff series than any other three teams combined - they’ve been in 70, by my count. They have lost more postaeason series than the great majority of franchises have had the pleasure of participating in. As a baseball playoff series is invariably close to even, and holds a high probability of an upset, it’s just to be expected that the Yankees would be responsible for more epic postseason meltdowns than any other franchise. It could hardly be otherwise - indeed, it’s almost a statistical inevitability.
The 2010 ALCS isn’t particularly noteworthy. The Yankees were a moderately better team during the regular season but not by a huge amount. Lots of unholy ass-kickings have been laid out by a team that wasn’t quite as good as the victim during the regular season.
Besides, the fact that the Rangers were a bad team in, say, 2002, has no more to do with the 2010 Rangers than the fact that the Blue Jays were over paid underacheivers in 1999 or that the Mets were overpaid underachivers in 1993.
Giants in 6
He is on the HoF ballot this year?
Oh, I doubt it
But weren’t there like three years in a row where Sojo was playing for another team and the Yankees traded for him right before the postseason, and then had success in that postseason?
Of course, Sojo is the guy who hit the grand slam double to help the Mariners beat the Angels in their one-game playoff in 1995. He was one of those mediocre players who had a knack for coming up unnaturally big in the postseason.
I’ll go with that.
NY and Philly are yesterday. The Rangers and Giants rule.
Timmy vs. Lee is as good as Kofax against Ford.
Fear the beard.
2010 is Torture. San Francisco loves it.
Go Giants!
Yeah, I thought ESPN or the YES network bought The Straight Dope for a sec.
Besides, what the Orioles are doing off season is way more important.
Wait a minute, what’s going on here…I thought this was the “let’s talk about the Yankees even though they lost, 'cause nobody actually plays baseball west of the Mississippi anyway” thread…
Having not followed the Rangers a single bit all year, I have no idea what to expect. But the Giants have been good for one thing all year long, and especially in the playoffs:
They do what it takes to win.
That’s it. That’s the *one *thing that their fans can count on. They might give you three heart attacks and drive you to drink along the way, but in the end they get it done. Somehow.
Giants in 6
Bruce Bochy for Manager of the Year, and Buster Poser for ROY.
Mississippi? Mississippi!? Try the Hudson. When’s the last time you saw Pittsburgh on The Eastern Seaboard Programming Network? When’s the last time you saw any team that was not the Yankees, Red Sox, or Rays (now that they’re winning) on ESPN, unless they were playing one of those teams? Ever?
I was originally going to say Appalachians, but I didn’t want to be accused of engaging in hyperbole 
Of course having distinct leagues matched against each other is fun. But it’s also true that short series test teams in different ways than long seasons; we can adopt a definition of “best” that includes the ability to win both ways or under both circumstances.
Basically, the best MLB team is the one that wins the World Series, because that’s the the objective–that’s what defines peak success in MLB.
That’s not to say that I wouldn’t mind some jiggering of the alignment, schedule and playoff structure to bring it more in line with how I think the objective should be structured.
Couldn’t agree more.
While a balanced schedule nominating just one team as the champion with no playoffs (and why bother with a World Series? If you want fairness, combine the leagues and have just one first place team) would be fair in one sense, there’s nothing “unfair” about the current format except that some divisions have different numbers of teams.
Let’s bear in mind that the purpose of Major League Baseball is not to achieve some sort of sabermetric nirvana of fairness, but to make money by entertaining the fans. I like the 8-team playoff system more than the old 4-team system for the straightforward reason that it is more entertaining. I get more playoff baseball. I still smile thinking of the epic 1995 Mariners-Yankees series. We got Roy Halladay’s no-hitter. We got Todd Pratt hitting a series-winning homer, Chris Burke did too, Big Papi did the same, Pedro put on the greatest relief performance of modern times… it’s FUN.
It means more teams play meaningful games in September, and meaningful games in October. Every team has to win 11 games over 3 series to win the World Series. It’s quite fair, I think.
This got me curious so I looked it up. ESPN (including ESPN2) televised 32 games this season. Of those, only 7 did not include either the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox or Phillies. Yes, those teams have large TV markets, but still.
How many of those games were Yankees-Red Sox or Mets-Phillies? Or Yankees-Mets/Red Sox-Phillies, during interleague play?
Here’s the link to the complete schedule.
It’s crazy that the World Series extends into November and yet they are thinking about adding another round of playoffs.
Interesting tidbit. If the Giants win the world series, Bengie Molina will get a world series ring. Has a player ever been guaranteed a world series ring before the series started before??
I haven’t seen this in writing, but I heard that they will move to a 7-game 1st round next year. Also, no future World Series games will be scheduled in November.
How do they reconcile these? I suppose they have to start earlier, or eliminate some rest days.