And so, baseball’s regular season comes to a close. Not with a bang, but a whimper…at least for the Milwaukee Brewers.
Pretty simple – today started with a guaranteed postseason berth if they won. I mean, this was designed to answer the question, “when you’ve got to bear down and do it, can you do it?”
And the Brewers didn’t disappoint – they proved they couldn’t do it. As I expected.
The thing is, I love my sports teams, and I have a major weak spot – as far as I’m concerned, they always have a shot. They’ll always pull it out, because that’s the stuff they’re made of. But this year is different. I harbor no illusions here. This year the Brewers have been all over the place. But one place they haven’t been is anywhere near a place where there was any consistency. You could almost see it with the three double-headers they played against the Cardinals over the past couple of weeks. Split every one of them.
But most of all I think you can see it by their abysmal presence at the plate. They were the picture of inconsistency (with the exception of strike outs, where they ranked second worst in all of baseball). Get this: they beat the Tigers 19-0 this month. Then three games later they get no-hit and lose 12-0 to the Cubs. Three games (two days) later, they clobber the Cardinals 18-3. Throw in there that they broke up another no-hitter to the Twins in the 9th inning during a game last month, along with their consistent lack of hits as far into games as 7 innings, and you can see why I’m thinking they don’t have a chance.
The thing is though, those other two teams in the hunt for that last spot sucked just a little bit worse than the Brewers. By the end of the day, for all three of those teams – the Brewers, the Giants, and the Phillies – it was there for the taking. They all performed so poorly that all it would’ve taken was for one to actually scrape together a win and they would’ve been in. But there they were – late in their games, and the Phillies down 5-0; Giants down 5-1; Brewers down 5-1. And the Giants were the only ones to make a run at it, losing 5-4. But the fact still remains – there were three 29-31 NL teams at the end of the day, and one of them is in the postseason.
Yes. A team with a losing record has a shot at winning the World Series. Wouldn’t that be a hoot.
But let’s face another reality about the 2020 season – we have no idea how well teams might be doing when they finally play teams that they’ve not faced during the season. The sample size is just too small. They didn’t even face common opponents And here’s another interesting point to consider: the NL Central’s best team batting average is held by the Cardinals – who are 22nd in the league. Three of the bottom four teams are NL Central teams (and all five NL Central teams are in the bottom nine). And the Dodgers tore it up (comparatively), coming in second in all of baseball with a .256 team average and over 100 fewer strike outs than the Brewers. But did they face the same caliber of pitching? With the smaller sample sizes, it’s harder to tell.
And yet half of the NL’s postseason teams are NL Central teams. Does this mean that they were just tough against each other – that they were fairly evenly matched? Who knows? But it’s interesting that the Dodgers only faced three other teams all season that made the postseason. NL Central teams faced double that at six. Put simply – one could argue that the NL Central played a tougher schedule (although most of it was against other NL Central teams) and still got four teams into the postseason.
In the meantime, the Dodgers got to face the D-Backs and Rockies and Rangers — you could even throw in the Angels, Giants, and Mariners. The Dodgers look so good because they got to beat up on a weaker schedule. And as my brother was telling me, it’s only a three-game series against the Dodgers. Anything could happen. Unfortunately, Corbyn Burnes is out so they’ve only got Woodruff…but that could be a win and all they’d need to do is scrape out one other for the series victory. Maybe it’ll be closer than we think. Maybe I can talk myself into my good old optimism.
Nah. Pitchers and catchers report in February, right?
