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At some point, Billy Beane is going to have to finally be held to a higher standard because when you make the postseason 9 times in a 15 year span and all you have to show for it is one series victory in the 2006 ALDS, then you are clearly not doing something right in getting the team over the hump.
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Posted: |
Oct 17, 2014 - 12:57 PM
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By: |
ANZALDIMAN
(Member)
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It will be the Kansas City Royals vs. the San Francisco Giants in the 2014 World Series.
Both of those Championship Series finished up rather quickly so both managers will be able to set their pitching staffs up with the required rest. Mets nemesis Wainwright pitched his heart out for St. Louis last night in a do or die game in San Francisco but it wasn't enough. I don't think too many baseball people would have predicted that KC and SF would be the two teams left standing for the trophy but so it goes in the modern postseason. And given how these two teams played through the playoffs to get to this point it should be an interesting WS.
But you never know in postseason play as was proven once again. You stay hot offensively, you'll go far. If your hitting goes into the tank for a few games against good pitching you're in a hole quickly in a short series.
I have to go off a bit about the playoff coverage. A lot has been written lately all over the place about the coverage of these games on TV. I haven't looked up the cable ratings yet but as a long time baseball fan even I was surfing around trying to figure out what channels and at which times the games were on. I knew to check TBS, and usually when TBS has a game go overtime with one about to start, they were bleeding the coverage over to their sister station TNT and interrupting the folks that are settled in over there who are watching movie re-runs from the 1990's. MLB Network has also leaned in and taken a slice and has shown some playoff games.
It all got confusing, to say the least. And it gets more confusing each year. And I was not the only one who noticed. I mean, FOX Sports 1 is showing MLB playoff games now? Their big claim to fame so far (other than taped auto racing, etc..) is that they sometimes similcast Mike Francesa's sports talk radio show. Since his relationship with the YES Network augered in, you can now watch Francesa sit there on FS1 talking into a microphone brow beating his callers daily for a few hours. I never quite understood the appeal of showing live talk radio shows on TV. ZZZzzz..
For anyone who doesn't know (and who can blame them) FOX Sports 1 is a (distant) satellite sports channel that launched fairly recently. CBS has one of these now, so does NBC. Most of the day these channels and their programming at this point are barely a faint blip on anyone's radar. IF you can find them and if your cable or satellite service even carries them. And those baseball fans that only have the most basic of cable packages may be SOL altogether if they want to watch live postseason games. Gone are the days when the baseball playoffs had a national stage on big networks like NBC or ABC.
The networks don't want to interrupt their prime time show schedules to show baseball anymore except for the WS. The NFL is now making billions of dollars dominating the American sports scene and drumming up huge ratings on the major networks. It wasn't always that way. Baseball used to be number one and now it's the NFL by a wide (and getting wider) margin. MLB is tinkering with baseball once again and has formed a "think tank" to figure out how to speed up the games and bring back the fans who may have strayed over the years and to attract a younger audience. Without the quality type of television exposure the NFL now gets in prime time, good luck.
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Well the outcome wasn't what I wanted to see, but it was a memorable World Series with a Game 7 that should be remembered about #5 in the list of great seventh games of the modern era. Had Alex Gordon simply possessed better speed it would have been the greatest of all time perhaps.
And now for the off-season. I approve of the Yankees firing hitting coach Kevin Long, but this team has to do a lot more to get them back into contention next year even though they won only five less games than the AL champs and were capable of getting in the same way. Collectively this team resembles more the dull and listless Yankees of the early to mid-1970s and they need to see some stars rise to the forefront whether it be Sabathia or Teixeira returning to form, and yes, maybe Alex Rodriguez does write a new chapter in his career (I'm not holding out much hope for it, but we can always hope. Bad as I think he is as a person, I confess my outrage about him can only pale before what the reprobates of the NFL have done and why I will NEVER follow that sport again for as long as I live).
Five months to Opening Day!!
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True, a lot of Yankee players broke down the last couple years but Long needed to try and get more out of what they had and when things were as stagnant as they were, and with the blame IMO not resting with Girardi, Long was the obvious choice to go. Yankee pitching tended to be the key to what held them above water more over the course of the season.
Robertson has been given a qualifying offer so the Yankees would like to keep him as closer. I wouldn't be comfortable rushing Betances in as a new closer before he's ready. I'd prefer him and Robertson forming a new kind of 1996 Rivera-Wetteland style tandem.
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