Let’s start with the two top seeds in baseball, now that we’re down to the Final Four in both leagues. The Astros won 107 games this season. The Dodgers won 106. One of them could win it all this season. They could end up playing each other again in the World Series, as they did two years ago. Or just one of them could make it. Or neither.
But it would be something if neither one of them won this time. Because in the last 100 years in baseball, which takes the 1906 Cubs (116 wins) and the 1904 New York Giants (106 wins) out of this conversation, only five teams have won as many games as the Astros and Dodgers did this season and did not win the Series:
2001 Mariners: 116 wins
1954 Indians: 111
1969 Orioles: 109
1931 Philadelphia Athletics: 107
1998 Braves: 106
All of those teams were tremendous across the longest and most demanding -- and best -- season we have in professional sports in this country. All of those teams except the 1931 Athletics did what they did, won the way they did, over 162 games. All of them except the Mariners made it to the World Series and then couldn’t win the four more games they needed. The ’54 Indians and ’98 Braves got swept, by the Giants and the Yankees. The Orioles lost to the Miracle Mets of ’69 in five games.
T.S. Eliot wrote famously that April is the cruelest month. Not in baseball. It’s a stand-alone season like October, where the Wild Card teams try to win 12 more games and everybody else tries to roll an 11. We ended up with four 100-win teams in baseball this time: the Astros, Dodgers, Yankees (103), Twins (101). They all won their divisions. They all think it’s their year. Every team still playing thinks the same way.
It is the biggest winners who push the biggest pile of chips to the center of the table now. But it is worth remembering as we enter the first big weekend of the postseason that losing out in what executives like Brian Cashman and Theo Epstein called “the October crapshoot” won’t simply delete the regular seasons we just saw from those 100-game winners.
I asked Dodgers manager Dave Roberts about the regular season his team had, coming back from losing the last two World Series to have a better season than any Dodgers team in history. This is what he said:
“Winning 106 games is an amazing accomplishment. We understand the ultimate goal is to finish this season off with a championship, but what we did this season is something no Dodger team has ever done. That can never be taken away.”
Oh man, is he ever right about that. His Dodgers are trying to become the first team since the Yankees of the early 1920s to lose back-to-back World Series and then win one the next year. And not only do they get back up after losing to the Red Sox in five games last October, they go 106-56. That isn’t just about the talent Roberts has in the room. It is about the character. Whether they can win 11 more games or not.
The Astros? They think they should be going for three Series in a row. I believe they’re still in a state of shock from losing three straight games at home to the Red Sox to lose the last American League Championship Series in five games. They’ll always wonder what would have happened if Andrew Benintendi didn’t make the greatest game-ending play I’ve ever seen in a postseason in Game 4, bases loaded, two outs, bottom of the ninth. If Benintendi doesn’t catch the ball, the series is even -- and maybe everything is different for the Astros after that.
And maybe no organization still playing is hungrier for a championship than the Yankees. They haven’t been in the World Series in 10 years, which feels like 100 years in the Bronx. Maybe there’s more urgency with their fan base -- even with 30 players on the injured list -- than anywhere else in baseball, as the Yankees try to avoid going through this decade without making it to the Series or winning one. There’s maybe even more urgency than there is with Dodgers fans, whose team hasn’t won the Series since 1988.
Fans always think it’s World Series or bust, especially in New York, where the Yankees have been sitting on 27 championships since 2009. But if their team doesn’t make it, they still better celebrate one of the most enjoyable and entertaining regular seasons any Yankee team has had, because of all the injuries. And Astros fans better celebrate the greatest regular season in their team’s history, as the Astros picked themselves up after the crushing disappointment of last October.
And what Twins fan on the planet wouldn’t have signed up for 101 wins back in Spring Training? What Nationals fans wouldn’t have signed up for this NLDS against the Dodgers when their team was 19-31 after 50 games? Roberts, one of the smartest guys in baseball, is right: Nobody can take away seasons like that, for his team or anybody else’s, whatever happens in the great October crapshoot this time.