THE silly season is upon us again: the dopey, overwrought, amped-up post-season as brought to you by folks who are (heh, heh...) supposed to know better.
It only took two days for the media to whip itself into "mid-season post-season form," getting all fluttery about the cluster of two-game sweeps in the four best-of-three series that came, saw, and conquered the vanquished before the folks who blather at you for a living could get their wind machines up to eighty percent capacity...
Of course, right in the middle of all this, with blather left over from his ceaseless, tedious, tiresome, tendentious (...) plugging of his new book, was Joe the P., making large out of small (sometimes a good thing, but rarely in his hands...). Ol' Poser Joe was mesmerized by the collapse of the Rays and the Brewers--as if these teams haven't shown some propensity for quick exits in the post-season in their recent appearances. (You forgot to make those windmill noises when you look things up, Joe baby: you were too busy hyperventilating.)
Likewise for the Toronto Blue Jays, who have made a career of late out of underperforming--why the heck wouldn't they extend such a tradition into the post-season?
Let's make large out of small just like the paid idiots...during the regular season, the Rays had trouble with the Rangers, losing four of six from them. Add to the fact that the Rays were missing their two best starting pitchers and their starting middle infield, and one could figure that they might be vulnerable in such a situation. The irony here, not reported on in the media--all too busy hyperventilating, natch)--is that the Rangers' #3 and #4 starting pitcher pickups in terms of name and reputation--Jordan Montgomery and Nathan Eovaldi--are the ones who throttled the Rays, not Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer. (And let's be honest--a best of three series is a lousy idea to begin with--teams deserve a bit more latitude than that after churning away for six months.)
Likewise with the Brewers, who lost four of six from the Diamondbacks. The Jays split six games with the Twins--but, just like the Rays, they left their bats elsewhere.
And the Marlins were fishy from the get-go, with their bizarre success in one-run games and long possum-play in the middle of the season. Even though they'd held their own against the Phillies during the regular season, the world of baseball was hardly surprised when the Fish were washed up on the shores of the Delaware River.
SO what else is behind the rejoinder in our title, anyway? Just how out of touch with the nuances of the post-season are these guys (and gals), anyway? Let us count the ways for you...
THEN there was a caesura (you can call it a "gap," we don't mind...) for a little while when baseball decided to make all of the post-season series into best-of-7 affairs. That lasted until 1995, when the three-division format finally made it into a post-season (thanks so much, Budzilla, for the travesty of 1994...) and another layer of post-season play was created. Sweeps started to decline percentage-wise as a result, and they became scarcer still once the winner-take-all wild card game was introduced in 2012.
So...baseball fans and media folk alike became subliminally conditioned to fewer three-game sweeps, and this is part of why the clustering we just witness has them agog (yes, we've been waiting for a long time to drop that word into play here)...
EXCEPT--we've left out something...something significant that destroys, obliterates, mutilates (even spindles...) that explanation. And what is that shiny, quivering piece of significance?
It's the fact that we've already had twelve best-of-three post-season series during this decade. We had eight of them in the chaos of the 2020 (post-)season: perhaps all of that overkill just collectively wiped away the media's normally elephantine memory banks. For out of those eight best-of-three series, six of them were two-game sweeps.
And it was likewise last year, during the first implementation of this funky new format. There were four best-of-three series played this time last year (i.e., 2022)--and three of those were two-game sweeps.
OK, kiddies, let's add that up, shall we? We've had twelve best-of-three post-series, and nine of them were two-game sweeps--that's 75% of them for those of you playing along at home--and the pundits are (yes...) agog when we have four such two-game sweeps to start things off this year??
So now, let's add things up again, shall we? Now we've had a total of sixteen best-of-three post-game series, of which thirteen have resulted in sweeps. That's 81%.
Why are these chuckleheads so surprised? Is it because they're chuckleheads?
Or are we just being too kind...we'll let you decide.
