Alexander: Amazingly enough, baseball makes it to the finish line
Baseball made it. The sport reached the end of its regular season Sunday, including the Dodgers’ 5-0 victory over the Angels to sweep the Pandemic Freeway Series, and before you stifle a yawn think back to the first couple of weeks of the 60-day sprint and the COVID outbreaks that threatened to derail not only individual teams’ schedules but the whole production.
Getting to Sept. 27 was no certainty. But by the end of the day Sunday, 900 games had been scheduled and 898 of them had been played. The only outliers were two games between the Cardinals and Tigers, part of a stretch of 17 Cardinals games wiped out from July 31 through Aug. 14 because of a COVID outbreak. All but those two were made up, and those would have been played Monday if they had any bearing on playoff spots.
They didn’t. Shortly after 3:30 Sunday afternoon the Padres locked up a 5-4 win over the Giants and gift-wrapped the eighth and final playoff spot for Milwaukee, which lost to the Cardinals Sunday. Too bad MLB didn’t steal an idea from the NBA’s bubble and put the Brewers and Giants in a play-in game Monday afternoon, the winner getting the Dodgers.
After all, commissioner Rob Manfred believes more postseason games are better, right? He floated the harebrained idea that 2020’s 16-team postseason, implemented out of necessity and at the behest of his sport’s TV partners, could become permanent. Our rebuttal: If more playoff games are desired, go back to the old 10-team system but make the wild card entrants play a best-of-three, and extend the Division Series to best-of-seven.
Instead we get best-of-three first-round series that give little advantage to the higher seed as long as those home games are played without fans. All this will mean, of course, is additional stress for fans of the Dodgers, who just got through watching a dominant season but probably can’t help fearing where the October hiccup might come from this time.
The Dodgers’ finished 43-17 with a .717 winning percentage. Under normal circumstances, that would have put them on a pace for 116 victories, which has only been achieved by the 1906 Cubs (116-36 with two ties in 154 games) and the 2001 Mariners (116-46).
Those Cubs lost the World Series. Those Mariners were knocked out by the Yankees in five in the ALCS.
Dodger fans, commence worrying. You know you’re going to anyway.
But let’s be clear: Just getting to this point, and still having games to look forward to, is a triumph. And a lot of the credit goes to the players in these clubhouses who observed the protocols and rode herd on their teammates to do the same.
“Ron Porterfield (the Dodgers’ director of player health) is a guy that’s kind of been on the medical side with us, and he’s done all the mandates and the testing,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “He’s worked and he’s been an MVP for us. And now you take the coaches and the players just understanding what’s at stake. And we talked about winning the game on the field as well as off the field.
“It’s kind of a game of attrition a little bit this year. And from all the players understanding how important it is to be unselfish and to make sacrifices, that’s not surprising but it’s really, really, really good to see from all our guys.”
Before this season even started, Angels’ pitcher and player rep Andrew Heaney talked about how the necessity of being a good teammate now went way beyond the field or even the clubhouse.
“It’s been a situation where the guidelines from the league don’t really extend out much past the field or the facilities,” he said in July. “But as a team we’ve kind of talked about … team rules that we would adhere to and things that we were going to abide by in order to provide the safest possible environment for everybody.
“You know, it’s about a lot more than just your own personal health and safety. That’s obviously important to everybody. But just as important is your teammates, your staff, your teammates’ family, your staff’s family, the community. All of those things are important to us. And so as a team, we’ve kind of set some guidelines, as to how we’d like to see guys handle their business outside of the facilities.”
The proof that it worked: Neither team had an instance of COVID-19 once the players assembled.
“These are first-class individuals in this locker room,” Angels manager Joe Maddon said before Sunday’s game, and while he wasn’t specifically speaking of their attention to those protocols, it applies.
“Their work is sincere and it’s tireless and how they interact with themselves and how they respect the manager’s office and the coaches’ room is really neat to see,” he added. And that’s all part of how they were raised (as minor leaguers), whether it was here or where they came from.”
On the field it was another lost season for the Angels, who got themselves straightened out toward the end but were living proof that a bad start in a 60-game season can bury you. And the first scapegoat had been identified well before the season itself concluded.
Sunday’s loss at Dodger Stadium ended at approximately 3:05 p.m. At 3:09, the email announcing the firing of general manager Billy Eppler dropped into the inbox.
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