Behind in the count
Baseball needs an October surprise to create interest in this pandemic postseason
Major League Baseballwas so invested in theNewYork Yankees going far into their pandemic postseason, it letTV executives schedule every Yankees game in prime time during the first two rounds.
Nowthat the Yankees have been victimized by another in a long-running series of Aroldis Chapman playoff chokes, will anyone stillwatch?
We’re about to find out, as the nameless Tampa Bay Rays faced the villainous Houston Astros on Sunday to kick off the American League Championship Series, while the powerhouse Los Angeles Dodgers take on the Atlanta Braves onMonday to open theNational League Championship Series.
The winners will meet next week for the coveted “piece of metal” trophy.
MLBtried to stimulate interest in this unusual postseason by increasing the number of qualifiers from10 to 16 teams, while ESPN marketed the wild-card round as the “Fall Frenzy,” an obvious comparison toMarch Madness.
Seeded teams, eight games in one day and a win-or-go-home atmosphere gave baseball a chance to replicate the feeling of the beloved NCAA Tournament.
But any resemblance between baseball’s postseason andMarch Madness has been purely coincidental.
March Madness works because everyone is invested in their brackets and in hating Duke. Its time-honored success is based on upsets by littleknownteams, buzzer-beaters by fresh-faced kids and college bands playing the opening stanza from“SevenNation Army.”
Multimillionaires flipping bats in empty ballparks with fake crowd noise and managers changing pitchers every inning has been a poor substitute.
Fall Frenzy is a nice concept, but no onewas refreshing his or her browser every five minutes to find out if either the Braves or Cincinnati Reds could actually score a run in their wild-card opener. If you blinked, you probably missed the Minnesota Twins’ season go up in smoke in the daylight at Target Field. ABC even preempted the end of the Chicago Cubs’ loss to the Miami Marlins in Game 2 of theirwildcard series to showPresident DonaldTrump’s helicopter taking him to theWalter Reed Medical Center.
No instant classics. Fewmemorable moments. America has responded with a collective “meh.”
Back in September, MLB Commissioner RobManfred said “one of the few good things about (the pandemic) is it has provided an opportunity to try some different things in the game on a one-year basis that I think has been a positive overall.”
So in 2020, baseball experimented with the universal designated hitter, seven-inning doubleheaders and putting a runner on second base to start extra-inning games. If only they had taken it a step further and experimented by showing teams other than the Yankees in prime time, perhaps they could’ve marketed the game by showing off the next generation of stars— players such as FernandoTatis Jr., Tim Anderson and Ronald Acuna.
Itwas quite apparent that baseball was hoping a YankeesDodgers World Series would save the season and give America the matchup itwanted.
Allwas looking good until Chapman did what Chapman has done best since 2016— serve up a crushing postseason home run in a clinching game. This time the culpritwas the Rays’ Mike Brosseau in Friday’sGame 5 of the AL Division Series, one year after Jose Altuve ended the Yankees’ season with a homer off Chapman.
The Cubs rescued Chapman fromserving alongside Leon Durham and Alex Gonzalez as the franchise’s all-time postseason goats after he allowed a game-tying home run to Rajai Davis in Game 7 of the 2016 World Series. But it will be impossible nowfor Chapman to escape his October legacy after coughing up clinching games in back-to-back seasons for the Yankees.
So nowTBS is stuck trying to get America interested inwatching a faceless Rays team led by a brilliant manager inKevin Cash and a sub-.500 Astros team that was jerry-rigged into the postseason by finishing second in a division with four bad teams.
In MLB’s version of the Final Four, the sixth-seeded Astros are the designated Cinderellas,
though they’re actually more like Cruella, thanks to a sign-stealing scandal for which none of their cheating playerswas disciplined.
Meanwhile, Fox Sports gets a rerun of an old storylinewe’vewatched every October for years— the Dodgers’ pursuit of their firstWorld Series title since 1988.
They plowed through the regular season with the best record in baseball, got avirtual first-round bye ina wild-card series against the hapless Milwaukee Brewers and then lucked out when the San Diego Padres pitching staffwas decimated by injuries, a recurring nightmare for Padres pitching coach Larry Rothschild. The Dodgers should have little problem getting past the Braves, whowere also fortunate to face two notready-for-prime-time rebuilds in the Reds and Marlins.
Fox’s best hope nowis for the Astros to upset the Rays and set up a revenge match against the Dodgers, the team the Astros cheated out of the 2017 championship.
AWorld Series brouhaha during a pandemic after a few purpose pitches from the Dodgers might be just whatAmerica needs in 2020.
But who knows? Maybe nothing matters now.
Even the presence of LeBron James and the star-studded Los Angeles Lakers couldn’t get basketball fans to tune in to the NBA Finals, which set historic lows forTV ratings only months after the Michael Jordan documentary, “The LastDance,” set ratings records. (To summarize in modern English: Michael > LeBron.)
Was it the lack of fans in the Orlando bubble? The political statements by players? The competition withMLBand the NFL?
I’ll hang up and listen for my answer fromarm-chair sociologists.
My guess is all that talk about sports fans needing a diversion fromthe COVID-19 pandemic, the heated political rhetoric and the racial problemswas just nonsense. Perhaps millions of sports fans suddenly discovered real-world issues madewatching games on TVirrelevant this year.
Whatever the reason, it’s clearMLBrolled the dice— and lost— this postseason by focusing on the Yankees.
Don’t cry for the owners. TBS recently agreed to a seven-year, $3.7 billion deal withMLB, while Fox’s seven-year, $5.1 billion deal runs from2022 through 2028. They’ll all get their money, no matter how many peoplewatch the rest of the postseason or whether fans will be allowed into stadiums in 2021.
But for now, baseball needs a real October surprise over the next two weeks to end the season on a high note.
Is there aMr. Pandemic October in the house?