The Chris Moeller Archives

A final 2006 World Series rant (Yeah, you wish)

If baseball journalists were held to the same high employment standards as the sport's big league managers, it would be just about now that I would be severely regretting my decision to leave the radio business last year. As a result of this year's laughably bad post-season prognostications, there would be enough vacancies in sports commentary positions that Jimmy the Greek could probably find work again. And I'm pretty sure he's dead.

Maybe America didn't tune in to the 2006 World Series, but I doubt that that had to do with the fact that small market participants were involved or that the games were a poor entertainment product. The 1985 World Series, by way of another example, also featured two small-town midwestern cities, St. Louis and Kansas City, and that series remains the most-watched Fall Classic of all-time. (Total households, not percentage of households.) The '85 Series featured bad umpiring and two teams both batting near the Mendoza Line, just as this year's featured bad defense and two teams both batting near the Mendoza line. How can the problem lie with the product when you don't know what the product is, or was, until after the games are over?

My theory is that the sport-- and FOX television, the tail that wags it-- does nothing to promote more than three teams. All the way through Game 7 of the NLCS, FOX was running a World Series promo that featured film clips of National League players, and all four players-- Carlos Beltran, Carlos Delgado, David Wright, and Jose Reyes-- played for the Mets. A group of American Idol participants sang promotional versions of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" in front of a scoreboard backdrop that read "Tigers vs. Mets."


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There's lingering criticism that an 83-win ballclub could win the World Championship of baseball, but who complained, outside of this blog, when the Cardinals were beaten from the playoffs five previous times this decade, each time by a club with an inferior regular season record. Nor were there angry rebukes when three of the previous four championships were claimed by Wild Card playoff entrants. Perhaps we were not seeing an 83-win St. Louis club at all, but rather the same 100 win Cardinals team we've seen each of the last two summers. They just decided to stop expending all of their energy before the playoffs began. It's always said, after all, that baseball is a game of constant adjustments.

The Tigers may have peetered away their chances with an historic collection of E-1's in your scorebook, but at least two of the defensive miscues were made on the handling of bunts, and since when is it new for a National League club to push the envelope on fundamentals in the World Series. To me it was incredibly retro-- forcing the champions of the Junior Circuit slow-pitch softball league to do the little things to stay in the game, the equivalent of the beatings the Dodgers and Reds gave to Tony LaRussa's heavily-favored Athletics in 1988 and 1990, respectively.

There may not have been any errors committed on those plays if the Cardinals didn't already have runners on base each time, exposing the weak defense of the Tigers' thirdbaseman, the leg injury of their firstbaseman, and the vast post-season inexperience of their flame-throwing, but wild bullpenners. Maybe the Series outcome implies only that A-Rod should try laying down a bunt sometime. Perhaps Detroit's pitchers felt they needed to be too perfect after the team's offense lost the opportunity to tee off against the likes of Esteban Loaiza or that classic #1 in any rotation, Chien-Ming Wang.

We all know the old axiom-- good pitching beats good hitting, and that's what this Series was truly all about. Chris Carpenter is the best starting pitcher in baseball, and the rest of the Cards' rotation fell in line behind him. Anthony Reyes may be about to show us he's a pitcher of that same caliber, and the hand-made sign of the night Friday at Busch Stadium was the one that read "Clone Suppan." Something tells me that if both teams had batted .300 in the five games, and runs were plentiful, we'd be hearing the same complaints about the quality of play, except focused on the inferior pitching.

Grateful that they're still employed, maybe the question baseball's journalists should be asking themselves now is not "How can a Goliath such as [whichever team won the American League this year] lose to a team staffed with the likes of Jeff Weaver?" but rather "Why do none of these American League teams have a pitching coach as good as Dave Duncan?"

posted by CM @ 9:30 PM