There are always what-ifs, but this year had some odder ones than usual.
The LA Dodgers, the best team in baseball based on Pythagorean W-L, need to win a one-game wild card battle against a damned good pitcher (Adam Wainwright) to make the real playoffs. Breaks of the game. They won one less game than the best in baseball, but the only team that won more games happens to be in the same division. To make matters even worse, even if they win that playoff, the Boys in Blue will have to face the top-seeded Giants, and will not have Scherzer available for a while, since he would need to rest after starting the wild-card game.
The Toronto Blue Jays didn’t make the playoffs at all. In fact, they finished fourth in their own division, despite the facts that (1) their record was good enough to win the NL East, and (2) their ratio of runs scored to runs allowed was the fifth best in baseball, better than six of the teams that are still in the hunt.
Some long-ball achievements:
- Marcus Semien set the record for most home runs by a second baseman in a season (45)
- Salvador Perez set the record for most home runs by a catcher in a season (48)
- Vlad Guerrero set the record for the most homers by a player aged 22 or younger (48)
- Shohei Ohtani – what can you say? The record for home runs in a season by a player with 20 or more pitching appearances was set by Babe Ruth with 11 homers in a season in which he was 13-7 as a pitcher. Ohtani hit 46. So he kinda passed that 11 mark. And his W-L record was 9-2!
Add an asterisk here: Ruth is no longer in second place because the Negro League records are now officially part of the major league archive. In 1922, Bullet Rogan was 14-8 on the mound and hit 15 homers for the Kansas City Monarchs. Rogan is a Hall of Famer who led the team in home runs, pitching wins and stolen bases that year! According to baseball-reference.com, Rogan finished his career with a .698 winning percentage as a pitcher with a 2.65 ERA. In his spare time, he batted .338 with power.
Sidebar here: the record for a full-time pitcher is 9 homers in a season, held by the great Wes Farrell, in a season in which he pitched 27 complete games! In the years when Babe Ruth was a full-time pitcher, he never hit more than four homers. He maxxed out at 136 at bats in those years, and it was the dead ball era, so four homers was a helluva year! The Bambino was, however, the best left-handed pitcher in the league and won the ERA crown one year, so he kept busy.
And it seemed like he hit one in every game against the future Guardians. Definitely the winner of the Brady Anderson Award.
Semien had a suspicious jump in power, but Perez…wow, 31, never hit more than 27 HRs in a season and caught 124 games (played 159). Let the new PED speculation begin.
Semien obviously just decided to change his hitting approach. As compared to 2019, his homers did jump from 33 to 45, but his on-base percentage tumbled, and his strikeouts soared. His ground ball to fly ball ratio went from 55-45 to 41-59. That is a major change in hitting philosophy. He apparently decided to embrace the modern offensive theory by opting for a different loft angle.
Remember when our coaches told us to stop swinging for the fences and stay under control so we could make solid contact with a level swing? They don’t believe that any more. Now it’s swing as hard as you can and uppercut. A season with 40 homers and 200 strikeouts is an acceptable goal. Joey Gallo hit 38 homers, struck out 213 times and batted .199 to earn his 6 million dollars this year. The Yankees specialize in these guys. Both Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton have had 200-K seasons.
Semien is a free agent now, and he seems to have figured that a 45-homer season for a second baseman looks mighty good on the resume.
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As for Perez, he did not really have a jump in power this year. He hit a homer every 14 plate appearances, same as last year. If you extend his 2020 season to this year’s 665 plate appearances, it works out to 47 homers and 136 RBI – pretty much identical to what he did this year. And he is an immense man, so his power is not surprising.
But when a guy comes back from missing an entire season with an injury, and his performance improves markedly at age 30, it’s natural to wonder what the doctors prescribed for his rehab.
More corrections for you Giants won 107 and Dodgers won 106
Also, had SF & LA tied, they’d have had to play a tie-break for the pennant, today. It would be considered a regular-season game & the teams involved would end with 163-game season records. Apparently, MLB is calling such a tie-break game, a play-in. While the 2 wildcard games are *not* technically play-ins. They are clearly post-season: “a single-elimination playoff game”.
There’s THIS almost pure luck, one game, post season, then the real post season when it’s more likely that the better team will win.
But you’re right about the stats. Wild card games go into the post-season stats, but any games played to resolve ties include stats that are placed in the regular season. (Ernie Banks lost a homer crown in that way, back when the National League used to have a best-of-three tiebreaker. Ed Mathews passed him in the tiebreaking series.)
FWIW, your point about “real playoffs” was perfectly clear as is & I agreed/agree. I suppose the sticking point for MLB is we can’t really have a “pennant race” that doesn’t end with someone having grabbed the pennant. Wait, you mean *both* teams have grabbed *the* pennant & now there’s somehow *2* of them? So we can make however many we want, yet there’s no 2nd & 3rd place pennants? What would they even say on them, runner-up & 2nd runnerup? Do #2 & #3 players receive prize money? There’s a can of worms MLB owners wouldn’t want to open.