When adolescent franchises from Jacksonville and Carolina advanced to their conference championship games last January, the NFL made sure America knew about this wonderful tale of competitive balance.
Yet when the wild-card Florida Marlins, age 5, play a World Series against a Cleveland Indians team that huffs and puffs to win only 86 games during the regular season, baseball gets bashed from here to NBC headquarters.
Generally, the media is blamed for spreading bad vibes, but we can’t be debited on this account. No major sport suffers such strife from within as baseball, where you find owners forever angry at players who, in turn, spar with the other all-powerful union representing umpires.
Fans can’t help but detect the odor, and the perception is that of a stressed-out national pastime, fractious and incapable of coexistence, let alone peace. This problem is so insidious, it vexes even pro-tem Commissioner Bud Selig, granddaddy of all positive spinmasters.
“There is this streak, this meanness,” he says. “We have to get rid of it. We have the greatest game of all, yet we do at times seem to be pulling in different directions.”
The Marlins and Indians broke no rules. Neither team outspent the defending champion Yankees. Each won two series to earn a berth in the Fall Classic. Yet there was baseball, having to defend itself against criticism from a TV network that beams banal Olympic events on a “plausibly live” basis.
A bit of free advice for NBC: If you can’t get into baseball, get out of baseball and stick to sequins.
The World Series had its flaws and dramatic pauses, not unlike virtually every Super Bowl. But when the most valuable player is a pitcher, Livan Hernandez, with an earned-run average of 5.27 for the week, it confirms that baseball is keeping pace with other sports in one significant category–dilution through expansion.
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Not only are there too many teams, but more playoffs than there used to be. That might in part explain why this Fall Classic was delivered to your living rooms from the stretch position–76 walks in seven games, would you believe?
Pitchers don’t throw strikes the way they used to, either, or they’re not being called thus. But also, the best arms just might be tired when it’s time for the biggest games.
Consider that Atlanta’s Big Three of Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux and John Smoltz logged 728 innings during the regular season. Is it any wonder that Florida beat them all during the NLCS?
Or that Andy Pettitte of the Yankees was 0-2 against Cleveland and Seattle’s Randy Johnson 0-2 against Baltimore after their summer workloads? Or that Kevin Brown of the Marlins wasn’t himself at the end?
Florida might have survived because of superior depth, on the bench and in the pockets. True, the Marlins do it the modern way. They invest $89 million, after which the owner decides he must sell because he’s about to lose $30 million. But give the Marlins good marks on homework. They have a solid farm system, and why were they the team that took the plunge on Darren Daulton after his nine knee operations?
The lovefest over the Marlins is so heated now that Huizenga, a baron of the bottom line, might yet secure enough backing for a stadium. All the right politicians were in all the right places for Series games here, the front row.
If he bails, and if the Marlins downsize, the odds of manager Jim Leyland landing with the White Sox still appear long. He is a friend of Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf. But the Sox have discharged some quality managers–Tony La Russa, Gene Lamont, Jim Fregosi, Jeff Torborg–and Leyland is quite aware of this curious trend.