Playoff picking, but not grinning
Our writer boldly holds forth on the Yankees, the Mariners and the most hideous uniforms in baseball, and asks himself, "How many times can you be wrong about one team?"
By King Kaufman
Oct. 16, 2001 | Boy, don't all those people who wrote off the New York Yankees after they lost the first two to the Oakland A's feel silly now. You know who you are. The A's were the best team in baseball in the second half. They were going back for two games in Oakland, where they'd beaten the Yankees six straight times and won their last 17 in a row. All they needed was one win over the fading, aging, hurting Yanks. No problem. Next?
Except the Yankees got off the canvas and won both of those games, forcing the A's to fly back to New York for Game 5 with the kind of bounce in their step usually used by the condemned walking the last mile. The A's spent Monday night bumbling in the field and stumbling on the bases, and the Yankees moved on again.
And what about all of you who wrote off the Seattle Mariners, down two games to one after taking a 17-2 shellacking from the Cleveland Indians in Game 3 Saturday? You know who you are too. Silly.
So, now that we're all feeling sufficiently silly, and some of us doubly so, let's take a look at the League Championship Series, and I don't mean a look through the MasterCard Fan Cam, about which: What the heck is that about? Does the MasterCard Fan Cam purposely seek out nondescript-looking people who are staring into space? Do no pretty women attend baseball games anymore? Are there no dancing fools with big pot bellies and no shirt? Is there perchance a cute toddler in the stands? Hey, Jim, here comes the Fan Cam: Put on your brown sweater and your glazed look.
But I digress. It's the Atlanta Braves vs. the Arizona Diamondbacks in the National League, starting Tuesday, and the Mariners vs. the Yankees in the American League, starting Wednesday.
Arizona and Atlanta may be first in the National League alphabetically but they were only third and tied for fifth this year on the field. They were good enough, though, to knock off, respectively, St. Louis and Houston, who tied for the best record in the league.
The Astros, who limped into the postseason by losing nine of their last 12, somehow managed to go downhill from that slide and didn't even put up a little bit of a fight against the Braves, who had braved a tepid pennant race against the Phillies, a race between teams so mediocre that when they played seven crucial games against each other down the stretch, attendance failed to reach 30,000 five times, and never reached 33,000. Sure, Atlanta fans are blasé and Philadelphia has an awful stadium, but I prefer to think it has more to do with the fact that people know a crappy product when they see it.
Those Braves, the crappy ones, the ones who had gone a scintillating 10-10 in the stretch run, were nowhere to be found against Houston. Instead, the old Braves showed up, the ones whose pitching dominated the '90s, at least until World Series time. Atlanta pitchers gave up six runs, five of them earned, on 19 hits in the three games. Bye-bye, Houston.