Baseball used to be different.
Other sports, like basketball and hockey, transformed their regular seasons into glorified tune-ups for the playoffs. More than half of the teams would qualify, offering little motivation for the elite squads to put forth maximum effort for 82 long winter nights. Just develop a little chemistry, try to keep everyone healthy, and prepare for an extended run into the spring/early summer.
There was a time when baseball offered its own unique brand of storytelling. This drama would play out over the course of six full months. Only four teams would be eligible for post season play. Excellence was required. Mediocrity was turned aside. And memories were created.
The 1969 Chicago Cubs are one of the more notable teams in the last half-century of baseball. They had a giant lead over the Mets in August, wound up going on an extended losing streak, and blew the division, ultimately finishing 8 games back. But wait, don’t the standings show that the Cubs won 92 and lost only 70? Shouldn’t that have made them eligible for some type of “wild card” slot? Sadly for Cubbie followers, that answer was no.
Or what about those 1987 Blue Jays, with George Bell walloping home runs and Tom Henke becoming “The Terminator”? They emerged victorious 96 times. Not good enough. They battled the Tigers down to the final weekend of regular season before falling short and being dismissed for their winter vacation.
Wildly Unique Sport
Baseball is wildly unique in terms of the length of its season. 162 games are crammed into 180 days. Three-plus hours of play, near daily, for half the year’s calendar. It made sense that if you were to have such a long and arduous schedule that in turn only the very top tier of teams be invited for a chance to win the coveted trophy.
After all, if you only had to be “pretty good” or “above average” to qualify, where would the drama lie? The best teams could get hot for the first few months, build up a comfortable lead, and rest easy knowing that their hold on a spot was essentially secured.
That is where the Tigers stand this year. There is about a month of play left, but make no mistake. Their next significant game will come in round one of the playoffs. Their job, for the time being, is done. Surely the post season will offer us tense moments and thrilling finishes. But there was a time not too long ago that such drama would already be enveloping the city.
Let’s pretend we’re playing this season with the 1993 American League rules and setup; the last year before baseball went to three divisions with an additional spot for a wild card. You either took first place in your division or took the first flight down to your condo in Florida.
The Tigers would have the same sparkling record at 81-57, but instead of cruising into October, they would be fighting tooth and nail with the Boston Red Sox. Yesterday’s Labor Day matinee would have been must-see TV. We would have a true pennant race. Two dominant teams forced to hang a W on the ledger each night or fear falling into oblivion.
Baseball fans still crave this drama, even going so far as to tricking themselves that it still exists. Heading into this past weekend’s series with the Indians, many in the metro Detroit area geared up for what they termed a “huge series.” But it wasn’t. The Tigers entered the three-game set leading by 6.5 games. Win even one of the contests and you could kiss that baby goodnight.
But fans and media wanted to believe these games carried extra meaning. Because that is how we grew to love the sport. Sure, playoff memories are wonderful and oftentimes unforgettable. But kids don’t fall in love over a 12-day period in October. It takes place in the dog days of summer, the sticky August nights when every team is gasping for air and the cream rises to the top.
No Real Race
During Tigers’ telecasts, they will often cut away from the live game to show us what is happening in Cleveland or Kansas City. It’s tragic, in a way. These highlights don’t matter. Yes, technically these are the teams trailing Detroit in the standings, but that’s window dressing. There is no race here. They are trying to build up the same narrative that carried baseball for nearly 100 years without acknowledging that the structure allowing for such stories to play out is lost and gone forever.
See, the only “races” that can occur now are between the 5th, 6th, and 7th best teams in the league. They will be the ones scraping for that second wild card slot. So yes, technically there can still be important games in the late stages of a season, but they will never involve the sport’s best teams. Just those fortunate enough to keep their head above water long enough to make a desperate dash for glory in the season’s waning moments.
In a way, it speaks to the culture we live in today. Patience wears thin. Attention spans dwindle. People have a hard time sitting through an 86-minute film without whipping out their phone a dozen times to check for new messages. We record games and shows to view at a later time. Why bother allowing the story to breathe, for the excitement to build, when we can just as easily motor through the entire package in a fraction of the time?
The same applies to baseball. Our regular season has been DVR’ed. Pay attention if you must, but the important stuff will only occur at the very end.
The American League in 1967 was a year unlike any other. The Tigers, Red Sox, Twins, and White Sox jostled for position to the season’s final weekend. Things came to an unceremonious end in Motown when Dick McAuliffe grounded into a heart-wrenching double play to eliminate the Tigers from contention. It wasn’t a fairy tale finish. It was crushing, in fact. But it remains one of the more indelible images in the franchise’s history. The World Series that was finally achieved in the year to follow was made that much sweeter by the heartbreak of ’67.
Tigers Are Coasting
And now we return to the present. The Tigers are in the process of coasting to their third consecutive playoff appearance. They will enter October with a fresh slate, hoping that Justin Verlander returns to form and that Prince Fielder rediscovers his power stroke. It will be a frantic three and a half week race to the finish. But will the memories hold up?
The Tigers have competed in five playoff series over the last two years, soon to add more in the coming weeks. But can you really identify individual moments in most of them? Probably not. They tend to all blend together, a messy conglomeration of events, hard to remember when one finished and the next began.
Dick McAuliffe bounced into that fateful double play 46 years ago. Yet it still lingers in the minds of Tiger fans as if the play happened last Thursday.
America fell hard for the game of baseball a long time ago, drawn in partially by the hot dogs, but mostly by the daily fervor that would take over a city when a pennant was on the line. We still long for those days, even if we choose to remain blissfully unaware that they are gone and not coming back anytime soon.
The Tigers trail the Red Sox by a half game. There are only 24 games left.
And sadly, none of them matter at all.
