Play ball -- the early 1990s way
By Rob Neyer
ESPN Insider
April 2, 2006.
7:13 p.m. Central Daylight Time.
Baseball's greatest season ever began. That's right. Greatest. Season. Ever.
Before I go any further, let me make this (somewhat related) guarantee: MLB will set an all-time attendance record. That's not a particularly bold prediction; MLB set a record in 2005, with 74.9 million paying customers, after a highly publicized congressional hearing that supposedly was going to have some deleterious impact on attendance (it didn't).
This year, MLB will clear 75 million by a healthy margin. Why?
For one thing, people really, really like baseball. Perhaps that goes without saying, but we keep seeing these polls that say baseball ranks behind football, basketball, fast cars and professional kickball in the mind of the American sports fan. Tommyrot. Baseball remains our national game, and I suspect it will for some time. I say this with little pride. As long as there are enough baseball fans to support my writing habit, I couldn't care less about the game's popularity. These are simply the facts as I see them.
I've spent the past couple of weeks collecting projections.
Why? Let's say you are presented with this challenge: You're given two hours to present your projected records for all the major league teams. In those two hours, you can (1) analyze the teams yourself or (2) find some reputable projections on the Internet with a truly slow connection. If you do well, you get to keep your throwing hand. If you don't, you don't.
So what do you do? Unless you're particularly smart or particularly stupid, you find the projections. So that's what I did.
And the projections tell an interesting pre-story. There is only one team I'd consider a good bet to win more than 90 games: Oakland. There is only one team I'd consider a good bet to lose 100 games: Kansas City. Both in the American League, of course. And there are only two other teams in that league that, apparently, have very little hope of making the playoffs: Seattle and Tampa Bay.
That leaves 10 teams for which one can make a decent argument. Yes, the Yankees and the Red Sox are once again the best teams in the East, on paper. But the Blue Jays spent a lot of money this winter, and that might actually show up on the field. The Orioles don't seem to have enough, on paper ... but what if Leo Mazzone really is worth eight or nine wins all by himself? The Angels and the Rangers aren't as good, on paper, as the Athletics. But they're good enough to make some trouble. And in the Central Division, the theoretically fourth-place Tigers are, in this man's opinion, legitimate contenders.
The National League is similar, but different. There's no National League team as good as the Athletics and none as bad as the Royals. The Cardinals are good, but not as good as they were last year (and maybe not nearly as good), so it's theoretically possible that somebody will mount a real challenge. In the East, the difference between the Mets and the Phillies and the Braves isn't more than three games. I've got the Mets winning, but you might as well throw a dart (and for all the talk about the Marlins losing 110 games, I'll be surprised if they lose 90). The West is wide open.
There are, right now, 20 major league teams in the hunt for the eight postseason spots. Plus another one or two I'm not smart enough to identify. Some of those teams won't play well for various reasons, but most of them will still be playing important games in August, and that's going to make for a lot of excitement and jam-packed ballparks. And I can imagine, without much imagination, three or four division races going down to the last week, if not the last weekend, of the season. To say nothing of the commissioner's beloved wild cards.
What's more -- and I hesitate to mention this because too much already has been made of it -- the game itself should be a bit more interesting this season. If all the reports are true, and the players generally are smaller and weaker, then we'll see a bit less standing around and waiting for the big fly. And that's definitely a good thing. Home runs and walks are certainly effective ingredients in winning games, but they're not particularly interesting -- at least not in excess.
So we have a great number of cities with teams worth watching, and we have the best style of baseball since perhaps the early 1990s. We also have an incredible amount of access to all these games, via satellite radio, television and the InterWeb. I know some older fans pine for those glorious days when the Yankees won the American League pennant every year and there was one game on TV every Saturday. Me? I'm convinced there has never been a better time to be a baseball fan. And I'm convinced I'm not alone.
Senior writer Rob Neyer writes for Insider two or three times per week. To offer criticism, praise or anything in between, send an e-mail to
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