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| in defiance of the "digital rights management" tyranny that prevents me from screencapping the Sportsnet stream I have taken a photograph of my computer screen with my camera-equipped computer phone (pictured: Joey Votto in a nice coat) |
Rather than sensibly pausing my Rogers Sportsnet subscription immediately following the strangely cheering end of this strangely strange fiftieth season of Blue Jays baseball, I have instead chosen a different path, and it is the path of watching literally every inning of postseason baseball these many playoff rounds afford us in our contemporary moment. This is not a course of action (which may prove to be a course of study [it's too soon to say]) that would be advisable or at all reasonable in many contexts, but is a viable one for me at present on account of how: i) my time is largely my own at the moment (a massive prerequisite to watching this much baseball, obviously); ii) rather than having these many games spread across any number of different networks and expensive streaming services (the case, as I understand it, in the fallen American context), in Canada everything is quite simply all on Rogers Sportsnet (their evil is, in this instance, a boon), allowing me to proceed without accessing an undue portion of the equity in our home; and iii) if you are not totally beholden to watching everything just as it happens (should, say, your interest be more æsthetic than informational), you can really blaze through a baseball game by starting a half-hour or so late and zipping through the commercials between innings (and indeed betwixt inning-halves), for one thing, and, just as importantly, you can watch the west coast games the next morning when there would otherwise be no baseball to watch at all (a dark thought) until the mid-afternoon games get going. That it has never been easier to immerse oneself so fully in one's predilections to the exclusion of engaging with the culture more broadly is probably not altogether to the good, and yet, at the same time, play ball?
Watching so much baseball in so little time (nine full games in three days [though it took me into a fourth to get to through that ninth one]) is clarifying as to what I am really looking for in a baseball game contested between two teams about whom I am largely indifferent from a partisan standpoint: mostly, it seems, I want to see the home team do well, so that the crowd remains totally locked-in in full-on postseason, watching-a-loved-one-try-to-defuse-a-bomb mode (as a Philly sportswriter had it some years ago; it was in a "social media" post and alas I can no longer source it properly). And so as much as I have no problem whatsoever with the Chicago Cubs, for example, it did not trouble me especially to see them swept away with first an 8-0 romp, and then a classic Kevin Gausman playoff outing (in which he pitched well against a lineup full of monsters only to lose 4-1), because everybody in San Diego was just so happy about it all. The Cubs brilliant centre-fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong, coming off an all-time great 45HR/41SB season (10.6fWAR or 9.8bWAR, an Ohtani/Judge/Bonds level of performance relative to his league), went oh-for-seven with four strikeouts, and got super sad. "We were challenged this year," Crow-Armstrong told The Athletic, a union-busting scheme orchestrated by The New York Times. "This team showed a lot of heart and a lot of fight through all the challenges. But [for things to have gone differently—ed.] I would say, to start: I show up. I show up when it matters in these games. That would help us immediately. But that's all I got right now. You can look at the scoreboard, you can look at the stat sheet, wherever you get your numbers from, and it is clear to see that I didn't contribute." I do like that despite his profound disappointment, PCA was able to remain broadminded and ecumenical about where we go for stats. It's a good message.
My enthusiasm for home-team performance was tested, perhaps understandably, by the Yankees' full-on drubbing of the Red Sox by a total combined score of eighteen to two (a good portion of the Yankees' scoring was backloaded in each game, so neither game felt out of reach immediately, though both sure did by the end). I find there is little to choose between these two avowed Blue Jays enemies whom stink to me. So far this century, at least, the Red Sox have been the bigger problem (four World Series championships to the Yankees' one), and I also find my thoughts returning, at times, to how throughout my 2001 through 2006 experience of SkyDome attendance, visiting Yankees fans, often from upstate New York, were largely agreeable, and would say things like "this is a beautiful city you've got here," whereas visiting Red Sox fans were often fairly obnoxious, and would say things like "Yankees suck," and chant rude sayings regarding Derek Jeter, which felt immaterial to baseball games that the Yankees (Jeter or otherwise) were not even there to contest. At the time (just after their four World Series titles in five years, with many of the key players still around), I felt like the worst thing you could say about Yankees fans is that they seemed to take maybe a disproportionate amount of pride in essentially cheering for gravity, whereas Red Sox fans seemed, by contrast, genuinely disordered. So it's never been clear cut for me, or at least it hasn't been since those days. Others in my home, though, take essentially the Buck Martinez approach ("Never cheer for the Yankees") and it serves them at least as well as all this complication serves me. But, to return to the general point of home-team happiness being pretty much the thing when watching as a more-or-less neutral observer, Yankee Stadium was a thoroughly stoked place throughout, and pleasing in this respect, at least.
But what, we might ask, if the opposite were true? What if, perversely, one were to derive pleasure not from the rapturous ovation of tens of thousands, but by their disapprobation? Is this not precisely what was offered by the papally sanctioned Chicago White Sox unseating of the Houston Astros? Astros fans did not show up in the numbers one might have expected for either of these games, and those that did started booing early (the second inning of game one; the first inning of game two). "What purpose does that serve in that moment?" Astros first baseman Christian Walker asked his postgame interlocuter, but also just the universe about it. Actually, full quotation, why not: "We’re here, playing at home; we need cheers. We need energy. We don’t need boos. What purpose does that serve in that moment? Whatever fans are feeling, we’re feeling it tenfold. We’re the ones out there. We’re the ones in the fight. We worked our butts off this whole season to put ourselves in this spot, and for guys to get booed, it’s frustrating." Totally understandable! Walker didn't seem to take as much heat for those comments as reliever Bennett Sousa took for his, which, if you are willing to read one whole sentence rather than just the first half of one whole sentence, isn't really all that bad at all: "The fans here are definitely spoiled with a lot of ALCS and World Series runs, and we have to earn that right to bring this team back to that position." People sure don't like being called spoiled, though, so this went poorly for him. "If we were in Chicago," he added, "it’d probably be loud as shit." I bet! These White Sox, coming off of back-to-back hundred-loss seasons, newly invigorated in any number of ways but most notably by 東京ヤクルトスワローズ Tōkyō Yakuruto Suwarōzu-legend Munetaka Murakami, have been a singular delight this year, and I think would probably be the unattached-partisans' plurality favourite to win the whole thing? They sure are neat!
It seems obvious to say that the Atlanta/Philadelphia series was the best of the bunch, in that it was the only series to go the full three games rather than just the two, but its first game was better than any of the other games any of the other teams played this whole round, as was its second: back-and-forth baseball with excellent starting pitching (much of it from starters! elsewhere there has been a surprising amount of bullpen-gaming it, which is of course intriguing in its own way), late-inning and even extra-inning home runs by the big stars (Matt Olsen, Kyle Scwharber, Bryce Harper) to swing things suddenly, and just an overall sense of two serious contenders who could just as easily be meeting in the NLCS rather than a three-game Wild Card series. That Atlanta moved on worked out well from our all-else-being-equal, let's-see-the-home-team-win-on-account-of-vibes perspective (though the Tomahawk Chop business, back in full force, remains gross [I don't think they do Truth and Reconciliation Day down there, of if they do, theirs feels different]), but I am a little sad about the Phillies, in part for my old friend Tosh, a true fan, but also just for a perennially strong team that is probably starting to age out of its best years, and that's always a little sad (you know who else is kind of getting old, though I am not exactly suggesting we should start to feel bad about it yet? the Dodgers! again, we can hold off on our lament for them a bit still).
These best-of-three series are over before you know it, aren't they? Less so than the one-game Wild Card play-in game that had been the deal for a while though, clearly. Someone (on the internet, I mean) pointed out the other day that of the now twenty Wild Card series to be contested in this best-of-three format, the team that has won the first game has gone on to win nineteen of the twenty series, which really is a wild rate of success, and in a sense argues on behalf of the old one-game play-in, aside from how more games means more tickets/broadcasts/revenue, but naked commercialism aside (please, guys, do not sully the good name of Major League Baseball with any of that), I am pretty much okay with the three-game series for really any number of reasons, and we will discover together that precise number as I enumerate them below:
i) The three-game series is a standard unit of baseball, one familiar to us.
ii) A five-game or even a seven-game series statistically doesn't give the "better" team a particularly strong advantage (I think the last study I read on this was like "the World Series would need to be twenty-something games long if you wanted to get it 'right,' but that's obviously stupid, so I guess we should just do whatever," a view I support, unless I am incorrectly recalling this view, in which case I prefer the one that I have just now advanced).
iii) The only teams that wind up in the three-game series are teams that either didn't win their division OR won the softest of the three divisions in their league, so the near coin-toss nature of the three-game series does not seem to me an affront to their dignity.
iv) Even though it has only occurred once in twenty times so far (almost precisely five percent of the time!), it does afford the possibility for a stirring comeback, and so in this respect probably beats the one-game Wild Card play-in just as a thing (even though Edwin's eleventh-inning walk-off three-run homer in the Blue Jays 2016 WC win over the Orioles is one of the great moments in team history).
But in truth I remain fundamentally a Regular Season Guy, and don't especially care how they want to go about the playoffs; they could go back to two leagues, no divisions, top team in each league makes the World Series, and I would be like "tough but fair," so I am not a good participant in discussions like these at all. I may be wasting your time (not mine, though; this is a relatively good use of mine).
As a final point, and to me it is not an insignificant one, I would like to note the overall excellence of the NBC (and "Peacock") coverage of this Wild Card round. Even the least adept of the four crews covering these series for NBC put together afternoons and evenings of baseball so far ahead of the nonsense Fox visited upon us as soon as the Divisional Series started up yesterday as to be, like, ludicrous (the Turner networks, TBS and TNT, handle the non-Fox half of the Divisional Series games, and do a great job, as they have for years now). The Atlanta/Philadelphia crew was especially and exceptionally strong, with deeply MLB 10: The Show-coded play-by-play from Matt Vasgersian (the way that game imprinted on me, you would think I was a child when it came out, but I was, quite to the contrary, literally thirty-one), Phillies-centric colour commentary from the Falstaffian John Kruk, and Atlanta-focused analysis from C. J. Nitkowski, who was no worse than fine. At field level, we had the ineffable Joey Votto, who, to the extent to which he speaks with a gentle urgently but without hyperbole, who speaks seriously but not humourlessly, about a subject (hitting a baseball) that is ultimately quite trivial but which he manages to elevate to an object worthy of perhaps lifelong inquiry, seems to me, in the best sense of the term, perfectly academic. This does not save him (as it does not save us) from the occasional ridiculousness (it may in fact engender it!) or complete error (who among us!), but it seems to me admirable all the same (although, of course it would). Great job, Joey Votto! And great job everybody, really. What a fun round of baseball. Let's see how it shapes up from here.
KS
