And fifty years ago today, on this day (October 6), we were getting used to a newfangled invention that baseball was foisting off on an unsuspecting public. It was called--for lack of a more scabrous term (notice how "scabrous" has pretty much taken over for that quaint term "imagination"? Dog whistles and tweets have left us bereft of actual wit...)--"da playoffs."But if we are going to be scientifically descriptive, we might well define them as the first "multi-part post-season" in baseball's storied history. It began with two extra series, and has by now expanded to two and a half rounds, which in our tortured age is either far too much (attention-deficit) or not nearly enough (meta-masochism). I will remind myself to digress on this subject a bit later, but for now we'll kow-tow to those of you who are doubtless already fidgeting as you read this...
The Orioles, who'd struggled mightily to gain a 2-0 lead over the Minnesota Twins (winning two consecutive extra-inning one-run games at home), took apart the very first "opener" in baseball history (Bob Miller--who wasn't really the first opener: he'd started 11 games for Minnesota during the '69 season but had been strictly a reliever for five years previously), thanks in part to the first of two errors committed by right fielder Tony Oliva (a man more than ready to be a DH, save for the fact that they'd not yet invented the position). Twins' manager Billy Martin, then known as "the Itchy One" (it'd be another decade before he'd destroy starters' arms by relentlessly forcing them to pitch inordinate quantities of complete games--hey, remember them??) went to his bullpen with impunity--and was punished for it time and time again.
Final score: O's 11, Twins 2. Five hits (and five RBI) for Paul Blair, four for Don Buford--18 hits in all. It wasn't a game: it was a mugging.
Meanwhile, at Shea Stadium, the Mets--whom you'll recall for their anemic hitting--had just scored 9 runs and 11 runs respectively down in Atlanta to take a 2-0 lead back to their home park. Their opponents, the Atlanta Braves, had cuffed around Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman a bit, but their pitching (instrumental in a 17-4 run that had gotten them into the "first multi-part post-season") had pulled the pin on several hand grenades, blowing apart the heroic homer hitting efforts of Hank Aaron.
They'd do the same thing at Shea that day: Aaron hit his third HR of the series in the first, giving the Braves a brief 2-0 lead. Their #3 starter, Pat Jarvis, dodged a few bullets in the early going, but served up three homers to the Mets (!!!) in consecutive innings while Mets' manager Gil Hodges provided the first glimpse of a 300+-win career for Nolan Ryan by bringing the 21-year-old into the game to relieve shaky starter Gary Gentry in the third inning, whereupon the future Express mowed down the Braves, allowing just three hits the rest of the way. Final score: Mets 7, Braves 4.
Actually, though, these games look too much like the ones we're seeing today. Five homers in that Mets-Braves game, for Crissakes. The post-season, whether "single malt" or "multi-part," was often an austere occasion, punctuated by elevated pitching performances. (In the days of the "single malt" post-season--1903 to 1968--World Series games featured run scoring of two runs or less nearly 42% of the time, as opposed to the historical regular season frequency of 32%. We'll keep you guessing about those ratios in the "multivariate" era from 1969 on...)
On the day prior to these two blowout games (Sunday October 5, 1969), we also achieved a "first." What was this brand new thing? It was a 1-0 post-season game that was not part of a World Series. (Just for the record, we're not counting any of the tie-braker playoff games/series, i.e. Dodgers-Giants 1962, Red Sox-Indians 1948, etc., as "post-season" games--the rules state that they are part of the regular season and count in the official season stats.) The O's took 11 innings to scratch across a run to beat the Twins, 1-0. Though we are not quite so able to appreciate it anymore, there is serious beauty in such minimalism.
And here are some answers. Strangely enough, we've had exactly fifty (50) 1-0 games in the post-season--and, at the moment, there have been 25 such games in the World Series and 25 such games in the "pre-World Series post-season" (...yes, we do get paid extra for devising all these different ways of describing these categories: our sponsor is funny that way).
You can see the historical distribution of these games in the two tables (one for the Fall Classic and the other for the Fall Classic's ever-expanding foreplay...ca-ching!). What's astonishing is to see how few of these have been occurring in the World Series since the beginning of the "multi-part post-season." Given the established rate of just under three 1-0 games per decade's worth of World Series, we should have had thirteen 1-0 games from 1969 on...instead, we've had only seven.
Now, it's true that the 2010s have proven (in so many ways besides baseball...) to be incredibly schizoid, and the first half of the decade was much more of a pitcher's mini-era than what's been the case in the recent time frame where certain folks seem bound and determined to set the Constitution on fire (and yes, we teased you with that with the image up top...just like the current administration, there's always a payoff to be found here sooner or later).
But it's interesting, is it not, to see so many of these games welling up now. Could it just be that there are so many more teams in the post-season these days that it's just more likely that several of these teams will "come up cold" and have a low-scoring game?
And what about those series results when a team wins a 1-0 game in the postseason? Is it a random thing, or does such a win seem to have some talismanic significance? (Skeptics of all stripes may rev their small-sample-size-engines now.)
In the 50 1-0 games in the post season, the teams who won such a game have won 34 of the 50 series in which they occurred. That's 68% of the time. Winning such a game in the World Series is a bit less of a harbinger: 16-9 (64%) as compared with 18-7 (72%) for such a win in the "pre-World Series post-season."
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| Still in need of a place high in the batting order: E. F. Schumacher. |
(We just missed having a 1-0 game today...the Cardinals took a 1-0 lead into the top of the ninth, but it fell apart for them in that inning and they wound up losing to the Braves, 3-1.)
So...1969 initiated a new post-season wrinkle, one where the minimum score could crop up with greater frequency (32 times in the past 50 years, as opposed to 18 in the sixty-five seasons from 1903-68--remember, no World Series in 1904!). In a world bent on maximizing its diminishment, this is an oddly agreeable paradox, since it reinforces an idea that needs reviving: small is beautiful.
(And don't think we've forgotten about that earlier, as-yet unactivated digression--we remember it all right...we're just going to save it for another blog entry. But here's a clue to hold on to: how can we spice up the post-season with something more outrageous and unpredictable--and downright random? Those of you who remember our crackpot notions for a round-robin post-season, first presented back in 1996, will vouch for the fact that we can come up with a humdinger when we put our minds to it. So...stay tuned!)
